Mixed Race Studies

Whiteness in the Age of Obama

The Huffington Post
2012-11-26

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law
Duke University

Recall the numbers: 59 percent of white voters supported Romney. More dramatically, 88 percent of his votes came from whites. One simple but plausible analysis suggested that Obama won a majority of white votes only in New England, New York, and Hawaii. His national share of the white vote fell by several points after four years in which Republicans, especially the Tea Party, worked relentlessly to be the party of whiteness.

As I’ve noted before (and so have lots of others), this was the barely-concealed meaning of Tea Party claims that Obama was not American, not constitutionally the president, somehow deeply alien. These ideas are so unmoored from reality that they have to be approached as symptoms, not positions. Race was also much of the meaning of tying Obama to food stamps, and of (barely less public) assertions that health care reform was a giveaway from white taxpayers to black dependents.

Those notorious maps showing the overlap between Romney states and the old Confederacy take on a grim extra plausibility when you consider that Obama seems to have taken less than 20 percent of the white vote in the core states of the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I’m reminded of the friend in West Virginia who told me, back in 1988, that one reason to support Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary was that he could pick out his solitary vote when the local newspaper printed the results.

But consider: whiteness, like any other racial category, is a made-up thing. It is a matter of what people do, not what they are. (Social construction is the clunky academic name for this.) Like other made-up things, it changes. Obama’s share of the youth vote in swing states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio was so high that clearly, somewhere around age 30, a majority of white people started supporting the president. Romney’s success with old people isn’t just a matter of the fact that America used to be much more white. It’s that white people used to be much more white—in the Mitt Romney sense of white. Whiteness, too, is changing. What might it become?…

…Race in the age of Obama

There are many ways to look at Barack Obama, a fact that has been both a strength and a weakness in his political career. One of those, one he invites and seems to believe, is that he is a man who made a pair of deliberate choices: to be black and to be American, to identify with both those traditions and to braid their hopes more tightly together. This is the conclusion of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and it has rippled through a good deal of what he has done and said as President.

That American identity is open to this kind of choice is one of the best things about it. That Obama’s claim to stand at the center of American identity has inspired so much resistance is a sign of the value of that central place, of its being—sometimes tragically—worth fighting over.

All of us who live in Obama’s age are, more or less explicitly, engaged in the same problem: how to orient ourselves to an American identity that no longer has its old center. The change, the beginning of overcoming the America-is-whiteness myth, is overdue and entirely right.

Maybe that identity will be more comfortably hybrid. American civic myth has always involved the fantasy of purity. The Pilgrims were righteous, goes the myth. So were the Revolutionaries. The Founders were wise and beneficent. The Constitution is full of moral truth. Our wars are good wars.

There is a strange half-rhyme between that fantasy of purity and the fantasy of race, especially the bad old idea that whiteness contains something special, rare, and pure—an idea few will say in public anymore, but which still echoes in our racially divided politics. These myths had many victims, most obviously those whom they defined as not quite, or not at all, American. More subtly, they mutilated history itself. They cost everyone the chance at an honest start to understanding the present by appreciating the past…

Read the entire article here.

Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time

Heyday Books
March 2012
192 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59714-188-8

Carlos Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

A riveting memoir of cultural crossfire

“Dad was a Mexican Catholic. Mom was a Kansas City–born Jew with Eastern European immigrant parents. They fell in love in Berkeley, California, and got married in Kansas City, Missouri.

That alone would not have been a big deal. But it happened in 1933, when such marriages were rare. And my parents spent most of their lives in Kansas City, a place both racially segregated and religiously divided.

Mom and Dad chose to be way ahead of their time; I didn’t. But because of them, I had to be. My mixed background meant that, however unwillingly, I had to learn to live as an outsider.”

The son of a Mexican Catholic father with aristocratic roots and a mother of Eastern European Jewish descent, Carlos Cortés grew up wedged between cultures, living a childhood in “constant crossfire-straddling borders, balancing loves and loyalties, and trying to fit into a world that wasn’t quite ready.” In some ways, even his family wasn’t quite ready (for him). His request for a bar mitzvah sent his proud father into a cursing rage. He was terrified to bring home the Catholic girl he was dating, for fear of wounding his mother and grandparents. When he tried to join a high school fraternity, Christians wouldn’t take him because he was Jewish, and Jews looked sideways at him because his father was Mexican.

In his new memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time, Cortés lovingly chronicles his family’s tumultuous, decades-long spars over religion, class, and culture, from his early years in legally segregated Kansas City during the 1940s to his return to Berkeley (where his parents met) in the 1950s, and to his parents’ separation, reconciliation, deaths, and eventual burials at the Rose Hill Cemetery. Cortés elevates the theme of intermarriage to a new level of complexity in this closely observed and emotionally fraught memoir adapted from his nationally successful one-man play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage.

The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (review)

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2012
pages 138-141
DOI: 10.1353/ail.2012.0035

Margaret M. Bruchac

By reconstructing the life history of Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797–1866), historian and librarian Judith Ranta has done some fine detective work that illuminates an otherwise little-known aspect of women’s lives in nineteenth-century New England. This compilation will be useful for scholars of social history, yet there is one significant flaw. Ranta champions Chamberlain as a Native American author, and she has organized the collected works to emphasize this point.

We need not retroactively adjudicate degrees of Indian blood, but we must weigh real and fictive kin affiliation when discerning social identities. Betsey’s paternal grandmother, Sarah Loud Guppy, was said to have some Indian blood, but no specific tribal nation was ever recalled. Betsey’s parents, William and Comfort Guppy, who lived in Brookfield and Wolfboro, New Hampshire, near Lake Winnepesaukee, identified as white people. Given their locale, in Central Abenaki homeland, Ranta assumes that Betsey’s grandmother was Abenaki Indian. There is no evidence, however, to indicate that Loud, her son, or her granddaughter ever self-identified or were counted among members of any Abenaki (or other Native American) community.

Chamberlain’s publications began only after the death of her first husband, Josiah Chamberlain, when she left an intentional community (likely Shaker) in New Hampshire. She worked in the textile mills around Newmarket and Lowell, Massachusetts, and ran a boarding house, while publishing dozens of articles in the mill’s journal, the Lowell Offering. In 1843 she married Charles Boutwell and moved to Illinois, but she returned to Lowell to work two more years in the mills and publish more stories in the New England Offering before settling in Illinois.

Ranta convincingly demonstrates that Chamberlain had ready access to popular literature, so it is no surprise that her narratives reproduced prevalent social and ethnic stereotypes. Along with hundreds of her fellow female textile workers, she partook of Lowell’s public libraries, lectures, and events and attended “Improvement Circles” featuring amateur readings at local churches. Chamberlain was sensitive to anti-Indian prejudices, and her style resembles that of Lydia Maria Child, with its feminine sensitivities and calls to justice for the downtrodden. Yet, as Siobhan Senier has observed, Chamberlain’s melodramatic short fiction and vignettes of home life matched popular genres, and her “dream visions” resembled transcendentalist ramblings (Senier 673). None of this suggests tribal heritage.

Ranta claims that Chamberlain tapped Algonkian storytelling practices, but I see no trace of Indigenous oral traditions, cultural practices, or environmental knowledge in any of her writings. Curiously, Ranta censored the collection by omitting Chamberlain’s lurid stories of Indian attacks against white settlers, perhaps because these might undermine assertions of identity. Chamberlain’s anecdotes of Indian encounters on the colonial frontier employ sharp gender and racial divisions with satirical overtones and Christian messages; Native voice and agency are absent or marginalized. For example, “The Indian Pledge” recounts the rescue of a racist young white man by a “savage” Indian, in exchange for the gentle white wife’s earlier kindness to the poor Indian. “A Fire-Side Scene” features an old Yankee veteran recalling, with some pride, the mass burning of a Native village on the western Miami frontier (125–26). Chamberlain’s pseudonymous “Tabitha” (presented as the author of these tales) seems to be an alternate identity, rooted in ethnic masking or cultural appropriation.

Chamberlain’s creative work must be seen as a commercial transaction; whether paid or not, she trafficked in productions that elevated her own social position. She earned high wages in the mills, but she also found time to compose more than forty stories for the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering in a few years’ time. Exotic narratives containing Indians, scripted by a woman of mysterious ancestry, would have been an easy sell, but what was her inspiration? Was her favorite literary character, the “old maid,” based on some older woman who befriended the mill girls? Who…

Bringing together our collective stories

The African Courier: The International Magazine Published in Germany
October/November 2012

Gyavira Lasana

The second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey took place at Barnard College in New York City recently. Our New York-based contributing editor Gyavira Lasana reports on the convention, which focused on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

“Black German studies did not come from academia,” insisted Peggy Piesche, “but from young people who wanted to know their own history.” Professor Piesche, who was born and raised in the former East Germany and who now teaches at Hamilton College in New York, asserted her observation during an early-morning panel discussion on “Teaching the Black German Experience” at the second conference of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) held recently at Barnard College in New York City.

Piesche’s words echoed a decided difference between Black Americans and Black Germans on the study and teaching of the Black German experience, a difference that would reverberate throughout the conference. The panel also included Noah Sow, the German poet/writer and music performer who was the keynote speaker at the first BGCS conference last year in Washington DC. Sow suggested that the term Afro-German be replaced by Afro-Deutsch, which is surely more German. All in all, the panel noted that Afro-Deutsch studies continue to fascinate students in the US, and are thriving and growing. That is questionable.

Here in America, Black professors of German are reaching retirement age, and they are not being replaced. Black American students are following the global trend and pursuing Asian studies – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. German lies quite low on the list of options for study. Still, the Black professors of German maintain a high degree of enthusiasm, fuelled mostly by the emerging focus on the history and culture of Blacks in Germany…

…These highly personal stories reflect the heartache, confusion and repeated dysfunction of many (but not all) biracial children growing up in the American milieu. Their quest is often identity: Am I Black or White (in this case German)? Or something in between? Is a mixed-race identity desirable/acceptable?

There is a growing discourse and body of literature on these topics in the US, but they tend to be marginalised by the journey of Blacks born and raised in Germany who more often cite systemic and day-to-day racism. For example, during an earlier panel discussion on “Claiming the Black German Experience”, Lara-Sophie Milagro, a Black German actress and founder of Label Noir, a Berlin-based Black theatre company, stated that “what I had considered to be my personal struggle is really the struggle of all people of colour in Germany, and what I had regarded as my personal problem and failure – not to be a real German and full-value human being – was really the problem and failure of a privileged and ignorant White majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:50 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom I (Roosevelt New Orleans)
Paper in AHA Session 220: Manipulating Freedom: Liberty, Enslavement, and the Quest for Power in the Southwestern Borderlands (2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST)

Johanna Lee Davis Smith
Tulane University

Rosa Mahier had lived her whole life in Mulatto Bend, a little community located a short distance from Baton Rouge.  Born a slave in 1813 and legally freed in 1827, Rosa was a familiar member of a network of free people of color which had lived and worked within and throughout the larger white population of the area since the 1780s.  Most of the inhabitants – black as well as white, Rosa included – were descended from local families of longue durée, and the free people of color in the community carefully cultivated their identity in order to perpetuate the security of their free status.  Rosa Mahier had been legally free for twenty years when Fergus Mahier, the white nephew of the man who once owned her, took legal action in an attempt to re-enslave her and her freeborn children.

Fergus Mahier did not ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, but his petition is as compelling for what he did not demand as for what he did.  Mahier did not attempt to re-enslave Rosa’s two brothers or her grandmother, all of whom had been manumitted at the same time and in the same way as Rosa, nor did he include Rosa’s mother Agnes, who also had been owned and freed by the Mahier family.  Therefore, the brief record of the case offers the opportunity to weigh the roles of identity, status, gender, wealth, and power as factors in the successful maintenance of liberty among free people of color in antebellum Louisiana.  Mahier’s motivation for the suit and the individual characteristics of the people involved present a trenchant illustration of the hair’s breadth that separated slavery and freedom, as well as the continuous efforts of aspiring slaveowners to breach that line.

Chinese-Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2012-11-24

Olga R. Rodriguez, Mexican Correspondent
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father’s hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.

Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.

Chiu’s father took a job at a relative’s bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.

They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese-Mexicans after President Adolfo López Mateos, trying to improve Mexico’s global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.

Twenty-one of those Chinese-Mexicans and their descendants celebrated for the first time on Saturday the anniversary of their return. Gathering at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City, they shared emotional memories of their lives in China and paid tribute to the late Lopez Mateos…

…Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.

But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.

Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.

“Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat,” said Fredy González, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying 20th century Chinese migration to Mexico.

In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China…

Read the entire article here or here.

Critical Theories: Hybridity and African Diaspora

Rutgers University, Newark
Spring 2013

Belinda Edmondson, Professor and Director, Women’s & Gender Studies

This course will investigate the concept of the hybrid society, or “hybridity”, in African-American and Caribbean literature. Hybridity here refers to both culturally and ethnically hybrid communities and peoples. Specifically, we will concentrate on the ambivalent representations of the multiracial ideal for African-descended societies, from W.E.B. DuBois’ articulation of African-American identity as a dual, or “double-voiced”, one, to Caribbean images of the mixed-race citizen as the core of a uniquely Caribbean identity. Course readings will emphasize historical context as well as the theoretical foundations for hybridity discourse.

FYS 102N – Exploring Mixed Identities

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Honors College
Summer 2012

Jessica Guzman-Rea

The aim of this course is to move beyond prevalent monoracial discourses by examining identities and experiences from a mixed race/mixed ethnicity perspective. This course explores many topics such as the history of racialization, processes of othering, acceptance and the politics of claiming, the role of education in racial formation (and vice versa), interracial dating, white and non-white mixed identities, transnational and transracial adoptions, and hybridity. This course will be interactive and discussion based.

ES 3434: Mixed Race Identities

California State University, East Bay
2012-2013

Examination of mixed race peoples—their legal and social status, U.S. Census designations, and identities from the one-drop rule to President Obama and beyond. The social science complement to ES 3430, Interracial Sex and Marriage.

AFR 108: What Passes for Freedom?: Mixed-Race Figures in U.S. Culture

Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Spring 2013
Cross Listed as AMST107, ENGL108

Vincent J. Schleitwiler, Assistant Professor of English

The idea of a distinct category of individuals identified as “biracial,” “multiracial,” or “mixed-race” has become increasingly prominent over the past few decades, despite the inescapable fact that the existence of children of interracial couples is by no means new. Indeed, historically speaking, notions of “racial purity” are a relatively recent invention—what might now be called “race-mixing” is older than the concept of “race” itself. Why, then, has the figure of the mixed-race person been receiving so much attention? Why is this figure imagined as somehow novel or unprecedented? Is there something different about the contemporary social experience of children of interracial couples? Why do people who do not share this experience take so much interest in it? Our pursuit of these questions will take us back to earlier periods in U.S. history, and to different figures appearing at the borders of established racial categories, such as the “tragic mulatta” or the “passing” figure. Most of our readings will be drawn from African American literature and works by other writers of color, but you should also expect a substantial amount of scholarly writing on theories and histories of race. These readings will lead to some highly charged discussions—which will not always end comfortably, or with everyone in agreement. Because this course is writing-intensive, we’ll spend significant time developing writing skills, with an emphasis on collaborative learning.