Mixed Race Studies

Miss., US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to read poetry at JSU

Clarion-Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi
2012-08-21

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
 
Pulitzer Prize winner and current Mississippi and United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will read her poetry at Jackson State University at 3 p.m. Sept. 20 in room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building.

This event will be hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at JSU and is free and open to the public.

In January, Trethewey was named the Mississippi Poet Laureate for a four-year term. Soon after, she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey is the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.

Read the entire article here.

Henry Louis Rey, Spiritualism, and Creoles of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

University of New Orleans
2009-12-20
72 pages

Melissa Daggett

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

This thesis is a biography of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a member of one of New Orleans’ most prominent Creole of Color families. During the Civil War, Rey was a captain in both the Confederate and Union Native Guards. In postbellum years, he served as a member of the Louisiana House of Representative and in appointed city offices. Rey became heavily involved with spiritualism in the 1850s and established séance circles in New Orleans during the early 1870s. The voluminous transcripts of these séance circles have survived into the twenty-first century; however, scholarly use of these sources has been limited because most of the transcripts and all marginal annotations later written by René Grandjean are in French. The author’s translations of the spirit communications through their entire run reveal insight into the spiritual and material realms negotiated by New Orleans Black Creoles as they weathered declining political and economic fortunes.

Read the entire thesis here.

Thrall, Poems

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012-08-28
96 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547571607; ISBN-10:0547571607
E-Book ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547840420; ISBN-10:054784042X

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces—across time and space—that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall not only confirms that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Native Guard: Poems

Mariner Books an Imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2007-04-03
64 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618872657; ISBN-10: 0618872655

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Excerpt:

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year – you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

University of New Orleans
2010-05-14
58 pages

Frank Joseph Lovato

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South’s largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• List of Census Form
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Origins of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Historiography of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Methodology Used for Data Gathering
• Economic Role of the Free People of Color in Ante-Bellum New Orleans
• Community Organizations
• Neighborhoods and the Free People of Color
• Free People of Color and the Prelude to the Civil War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Tables
• Maps
• Census Forms
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1 – 4th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 2 – 5th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 3 – New Orleans Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 4 – New Orleans Colored Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 5 –Population Density of Colored Males in 1850 & 1860

List of Tables

• Table 1 – 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 2 – 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 3 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 4 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 5 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1850 New Orleans
• Table 6 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1860 New Orleans

List of Maps

• MUNICIPALITIES and WARDS 1847
• WARDS 1852
• Neighborhoods in New Orleans

List of Census Forms

• Title Page 1st and 4th Wards (1st Municipality)
• 1st Ward, 1st Municipality – 1850
• 9th Wards -1860

Read the entire thesis here.

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

Read the entire article here.

Q&A: Professor examines those ‘outside the color lines’ in new book

University of Wisconsin-Madison
News
2012-10-20

Jenney Price

The history of segregation in the United States is often seen in black and white. Leslie Bow, professor of English and Asian American studies, is interested in the experiences of communities that fell outside those color lines. In her new book, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South, Bow examines what segregation demanded of people who did not fall into the category of black or white — including Asians, American Indians and people of mixed race.

Wisconsin Week: What did segregation mean for people who — as you described it — stood outside the color lines? You posed the question, “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?’

Leslie Bow: I think what’s most interesting to me about a project like this is that we often conflate race with African-Americans or see race as a black-white issue. When we say “multiculturalism” … we don’t think conceptually or theoretically about the challenge that poses to the way we think about racial history in the United States…

…WW: You mentioned your parents, who are Chinese-American. They attended white schools in Arkansas but didn’t socialize with and weren’t invited to the homes of their white classmates and I wondered how much their experience impacted your research interests?

LB: Definitely, because it was something that they themselves did not talk about. What I found was that they mediated that experience by creating a third level of segregation where there was limited social engagement with either whites or blacks. Their social context was wholly Chinese-American at the time. So, to me that was just the jumping off point for really an exploration of ambiguity, which is very much the bread and butter of literary studies: How you come to this process of interpreting multiple meanings within any given text…

Read the entire article here.

“What About the Children?” The Psychological and Social Well-Being of Multiracial Adolescents

The Sociological Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 1 (February 2006)
pages 147–173
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2006.00041.x

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck
University of Wisconsin–Madison

We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well-being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self-identification or by their parents’ racial identifications.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

Chapter in:

Race Struggles
University of Illinois Press
2009
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07648-0

Edited by:

Theodore Koditschek, Professor of History
University of Missouri, Columbia

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Helen A. Neville, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chapter Author:

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Since the early 1990s, there has emerged in the United States a push to racially reclassify persons with one black and one white parent as biracial. A central feature of what I am calling the biracial project is a cohort of scholars, themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for people of mixed parentage (PMP) than a black one. These scholars maintain that when PMP identify as biracial, they gain a more mentally healthy racial identity, have fewer experiences of alienation, and are able to express their racial and cultural distinction from African Americans. In addition to the presumed personal benefits of such an identity, these scholars suggest that a biracial identity is a positive step in moving society beyond race and toward a color-blind society. What remains troubling about this scholarship, though, is a tendency to conceptualize PMP as a distinct racial group, and the inattention to the potentially negative political impact such a reclassification would have on African Americans.

Historically and currently, white supremacy in the United States has hinged on the oppression of people of African descent. The position of African Americans in the political economy has served as the basis for developing a racialized social system, restructuring that system at different historical moments, and incorporating new social groups into the racial hierarchy as races. Asserting a new racial group premised on a claim to an inherent (biological) whiteness and a rejection of blackness taps into the intricacies, logics, and values of that very system. It is therefore important to remember that the push for a biracial racial category arose and made its greatest strides amid predictions that by the year 2050 whites will be a numerical minority. More than a question of self-identity, the push for a biracial identity concerns substantiating the existence of a new race to be positioned as an intermediary between blacks and whites in a reordered racialized social system. Indeed, in the United States there have always been multiple racial groups situated below whites in the racial hierarchy. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has recently argued that, increasingly, different groups are beginning to hold a position of “honorary whiteness” within that hierarchy. Taking into account the structures of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, I remain unconvinced that an honorary white racial status in the United States would include PMP, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, though I agree with his claim that various racialized groups that were previously denied the privileges of whiteness increasingly enjoy advantages, privileges, and access to centers of power that continue to be denied black people and those whom Bonilla-Silva calls the “collective black.” Far from helping to erase existing color lines or challenging the new racial formations described by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Bonilla-Silva, it would draw yet another color line. And unlike certain Asian and Latino groups, a new biracial race stakes its claim, quite literally, on possessing whiteness.

The biracial project approaches racial identity as racial identification, or the assertion of a racial category. Using identity as a synonym tor race has also entailed inadequate attention to the complexities of identity. Consequently, these works rarely engage the psychological scholarship on black identity formation, not to mention the historical, sociological, and cultural interrogations of blackness that have appeared in Black Studies over the past century. Most troubling is the inattention, if not utter aversion, to the history of PMP considering themselves black and struggling over the meanings of blackness.

It is hardly coincidental that these scholars presume certain antiracist attributes to inhere in a biracial identity. In asserting the subversive character of a biracial identity, Maria P. P. Root maintains that it “may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports.” Naomi Zack and G. Reginald Daniel more plainly argue that a biracial identity hastens the end of racial categories altogether by challenging popular notions of race. For Zack in particular, a biracial identity serves as the basis for “ultimately disabus(ing) Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race,” thus leading society away from racial classifications and hastening racisms demise. Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real, largely asserted with little research substantiating the claims of its proponents.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Situating the discussion of biracial identity in the context of race and racial oppression as structural relationships, I provide a detailed review of the theoretical and prescriptive literature advocating a biracial identity. Specifically, I am concerned with this racial projects theoretical basis for a biracial identity, how it conceptualizes race and racism, the place of the one-drop rule in this conceptualization, and the defense of biracial identity as an antiracist tool…

Read the chapter here.