Mixed Race Studies

Jefferson’s Women

The Humanist: A Magazine of Critical Inquiry and Social Concern
March/April 2012

Cleo Fellers Kocol

Thomas Jefferson was a private man who kept his personal life to himself, and yet today 18,000 of his letters exist in the public forum. In them, this farmer, architect, inventor, philosopher, politician, attorney, and “man of letters”—learned in all disciplines, a true visionary—expounded upon everything but his love life. This we know of Jefferson: he was a deist, a moralist, and a revolutionary. He wrote the Declaration of Independence and, in a letter to James Madison from Paris, suggested adding a Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. He held positions of prominence within the newly formed United States (secretary of state, vice president, and president). He also wrote the book, Notes on the State of Virginia, and edited the New Testament into a volume he considered more believable, leaving out all the miracles and keeping what he considered the moral teachings of Jesus. He was proudest of founding the University of Virginia. And like all of the Founding Fathers, he’s become an icon, above the hoi polloi. But historians have had to connect the dots to give us a real picture of Jefferson the man—one who has become the model, not only of our intellectual and democratic ideals, but, inadvertently, of the often subtle racism that exists today.

In 1810, he listed his daily schedule in a letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, the engineer from Poland responsible for the Colonies’ fortifications, “My mornings are devoted to correspondence, from breakfast to dinner I am in my shops, my garden, or on horseback among my farms. From dinner to dark I give to society and recreation with my neighbors and friends, and from candlelight to early bedtime, I read.” He got a bit closer to confiding more personal information to Dr. Vine Utley, of Lyme, Connecticut. In 1819 he wrote: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an ailment but as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” But despite this sharing of his personal life, he never wrote of the two women who were closest to him during his life—his wife and his slave mistress.

What manner of a man was the undisclosed Thomas Jefferson? Of course we know he was born just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the frontier in those days. His parents were aristocrats; his mother, Jane, was a Randolph, and his father, Peter, was a planter and surveyor whose map of Virginia was universally used in the colonial era. The elder Jefferson had an extensive library that included William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift among others. Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen. During his formative years Thomas was tutored by the extremely conservative Reverend James Maury, an Anglican clergyman. Jefferson’s ideas about morality and religion would later jell in a way his tutor would not have applauded…

…Jefferson’s daughter, Patsy, had already been in Paris with him, and he now sent for his daughter Polly, asking that she be accompanied by a woman servant. Instead, one of the Hemings children, fourteen-year-old Sally, was sent. We don’t know when Jefferson and Sally became intimate, but we do know that she was pregnant when they returned to Monticello.

Before a 1998 DNA analysis showed a match between the Jefferson male line and a Hemings descendant, scholars, historians, and the public denied that a romantic relationship between Jefferson and his slave could have happened. As Joseph Ellis notes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1998), Jefferson had become not only an icon but a myth, larger than life. This thinking temporarily blinded people to reality. Today, however, we can look to other events and speculate how his relationship with Sally Hemings may have played a role. His beloved daughter, Patsy, for example, married just two months after returning home from Paris. There is no indication that she and her husband-to-be, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., had been eager correspondents while she was away, and there is no indication that they had been anything more than friendly cousins before she went to France. Could she have been afraid of losing her number-one spot with her father? Or can we attribute her actions to shock and anger upon learning of her father’s affair with a slave she’d known her entire life?

Such a reaction certainly would have echoed the hypocritical and confusing feelings the majority of Americans held about slavery during those colonial and post-revolutionary years. Abigail Adams, for example, was a devout abolitionist but, after seeing Othello, wrote that she was quite undone seeing a play about a marriage between a black man and a white woman. She felt horror and disgust every time she saw the Moor touch the gentle Desdemona. Abigail was no different than most of her peers. When she referred to Hemings as “the girl” rather than using her name, it was hardly seen as strange.

At Monticello, Sally Hemings was known as “dashing Sally” and was said to have a pleasing disposition. Beautiful and extremely light-skinned, she bore a probable resemblance to her late half-sister, Martha, Jefferson’s beloved wife. Hemings could also read and write and had learned to speak French while in Paris…

…Today, when African-American representatives of the government are spit upon and verbally assaulted, or when more subtle or more blatant acts erupt, the legacy of the past cannot be dismissed, and our most revered historical figures must bear some blame. We could say that Jefferson and the others reflected the social and economic mores of the times, and in a way that’s true. But their thinking had serious limitations and lasting implications. We see this thinking now, not in blatant violence like the lynching of black people or the violent reactions of some whites during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but in less easily discernible ways, like the slow pace we took in eliminating “separate but equal,” in getting rid of poll taxes, or integrating neighborhoods. Today blacks are still paid less than whites in many instances. Discrimination in housing, schooling, and voting still takes place. As a society, we routinely deplore racial violence and say we are not prejudiced, but racism still exists. For instance, U.S. presidential candidates routinely speak at universities, schools, and public venues that discriminate against African Americans. Also, too often religion and bigotry go hand in hand. And when the main objective of a political party is to “make Barack Obama a one-term president,” few people protest, even those who support him. So if we’re being honest, we must contend that otherwise admirable historical figures like Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Monroe, and Abigail Adams contributed to the legacy of racism.

It is now accepted as fact by most historians that Sally Hemings bore six of Jefferson’s children, four of whom survived to adulthood—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, all named by Jefferson after his best friends. (Was James Madison amused, annoyed, or was it a habit friends indulged in even as they indulged their libidos?) Jefferson’s belief in racial superiority is evident in his theory about the offspring of mixed-race couples, including his own. He felt that an infusion of white blood could make a person half black, and another infusion would make their offspring one-fourth black. Sally Hemings was one-fourth black. Offspring of a so-called quadroon and a white man would, in Jefferson’s thinking, make them equal to whites. And yet his children by Sally were never treated as completely equal. The contradictions were rife…

Read the entire article here.

Historian Unmasks Quadroon Myth

New Wave
Tulane University News
2011-08-17

Carol J. Schlueter

Historian Emily Clark has been here before, plowing through New Orleans archival documents from the early 1800s, handwritten in French. Her latest search has unveiled truths about a group of women that Clark says history has maligned: free women of color.

“I want to bring them to the attention of history again,” says Clark, an associate professor who holds the Clement Chambers Benenson Professorship in American Colonial History at Tulane.

Funding from a state Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars (ATLAS) grant has allowed Clark to extend a sabbatical and work on a new book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon.

Myths abound about “quadroon balls” in early-19th-century New Orleans in which quadroons—described by Clark as “a name for any woman who seemed to be of mixed race”—were presented to groups of white men. With marriages between the two groups forbidden, what supposedly resulted was plaçage, a contractual living-together arrangement.

But when Clark went looking in the archives, she found something else…

Read the entire article here.

Half and Half

The Cornell Daily Sun
Ithaca, New York
2012-03-28

Rebecca Lee

Just about the only thing I am looking forward to about graduation is finally being able to meet all of my best friends’ parents.  In high school, we knew our friends’ parents almost as well as our own, calling them by their first names, even dropping a playful “Mom” now and then.   Au contraire, we go through college barely having met the creators of the people with whom we share everything, from our rooms to our nights to our secrets.  Meeting a friend’s parents is an “aha” moment in which you are almost in awe of the physical representation of genetics in front of you.

Ah, genetics.  It’s where I get my mom’s smile and idealism, my dad’s olive skin and innate quietude.  It’s why I can both wear a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” shirt on St. Patrick’s Day and send out Chinese New Year cards when my family misses the traditional holiday season.  It’s why some people think I’m adopted.  It’s why I proudly refer to myself as a halfie.

In all honesty, my Chinese dad grew up in Great Neck and I am not even that good at using chopsticks.   But even though I am thoroughly Americanized, I still feel close to my distinct Chinese heritage.  For one, I am perceptibly Asian, whereas the other half of my genes are a little more, well, recessive. I even spent the first seven years of my life in Chinatown, at a public kindergarten where I was the only kid who didn’t know how to speak Chinese. But I have to wonder whether I would feel as close a connection to my Asian heritage if my last name wasn’t Lee, if my hair wasn’t naturally dark and stick straight, if I didn’t grow up knowing my Chinese grandparents…

…When people say that they only want to be with someone of their same race or religion, I take it as somewhat of a personal offense, since my own mixed-race existence was in such clear defiance of those beliefs.  I used to think it was closed minded of my Catholic friends to only follow up on Catholic advances.  I used to think it was cruel and unusual for my Indian friends to have to only date other Indians.   I used to see it as a kind of discrimination, even.  I used to protest, caught up by a combination of romantic whimsy and defensiveness — Give everyone a fair chance! You can’t help who you fall in love with! People are people!

And it’s true, people are people, but people are also products of their cultures and beliefs.  Is it really discrimination to prefer to be with people who share those things with you?…

Read the entire article here.

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

University of Minnesota Press
2010
296 pages
25 b&w photos, 2 tables
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8

Jean M. O’Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
University of Minnesota

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.

In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
December 1996
303 pages

Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
• CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
• CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

Read the entire thesis here.

Passing and the figure of the Europeanized American in Edith Wharton’s fiction

Purdue University
2005
216 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3210795
ISBN: 97805425959510

Jasmina Starcevic

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Jasmina Starcevic In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation traces the evolution of the Europeanized American as a passing figure in five works by Edith Wharton—The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920), The Old Maid (1924), and The Mother’s Recompense (1925). By reading Wharton’s major fiction through the lens of the passing narrative, I show that the Europeanized American emerges as a vehicle of mediation and the expression of the relationship between the cultures of Europe and America, crucial for exploring the issues of gender, class, race and nationality. I argue that Wharton invests the Europeanized American with the characteristics of the passing subject, thus deploying an ostensibly white figure as the trope of racial difference. Stripped of their fitness for self-government, Europeanized Americans figure as undesirable, unfit, or traitorous subjects vying for the social privileges of the white establishment in the face of psychological persecutions, marginalization, and even death. In order to secure acceptance in the white hegemony, the Europeanized American must engage in a form of passing. Unlike Americans of European descent (or European Americans), Europeanized Americans embody “Europeaness” as an indiscernible trait, not simply visible on the surface of the subject’s body. This important distinction allows Wharton to portray Europeanized Americans as culturally and racially more complex than their European or American “cousins.”

The body of historical and theoretical work on passing produced by prominent social, political, literary and cultural theorists provides the theoretical framework for my analysis of passing in Wharton’s fiction. In Wharton’s major works, passing denotes both psychological and performative aspects of the struggle to acquire social visibility and secure place within the national cultural matrix, and it is directly related to the production of whiteness and American identity. This study establishes the Europeanized American as a passing figure and explores the significance of the figure in Wharton’s major works.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION: Passing in Edith Wharton’s Fiction
• CHAPTER ONE: Passing Through the House of Mirth: The Figure of the Europeanized American in Wharton’s Early Fiction
• CHAPTER TWO: The “Cool Security” of Class: Cross-Racial Theater and Upward Mobility in The Custom of the Country
• CHAPTER THREE: Marriage, Race, and Nation: Passing in The Age of Innocence
• CHAPTER FOUR: Old World Mothers and New World Daughters: Motherhood and Passing in The Old Maid and The Mother’s Recompense
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• VITA

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” Address, March 18, 2008

Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2009
pp. 167-194
DOI: 10.1353/rap.0.0101

David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
Robert D. Clark Honors College
University of Oregon

Barack Obama’s address of March 18, 2008, sought to quell the controversy sparked by YouTube clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ, condemning values and actions of the United States government. In this address, Obama crosses over the color line with a rhetorical strategy designed to preserve his viability as a presidential candidate and in so doing, delivered a rhetorical masterpiece that advances the cause of racial dialogue and rapprochement. Because of his mixed racial heritage, he could bring perceptions and misperceptions in black and white “hush harbors” into the light of critical reason. The address succeeds, I argue, because Obama sounds the prophetic voice of Africentric theology that merges the Jewish and Christian faith traditions with African American experience, assumes theological consilience (that different religious traditions share a commitment to caring for others), and enacts the rhetorical counterpart to Levinas’s philosophy featuring the “face of the other.”

The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory and the Presidential Race

Theory & Event
Volume 15, Issue 1 (March 2012)
DOI: 10.1353/tae.2012.0010

P.J. Brendese, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
Haverford College

The 2008 U.S. presidential race dramatized the connection between America’s segregated memory and its segregated polity. This essay makes the case that James Baldwin offers valuable insight into the legacy of segregated memory in contemporary racial politics in general, and the presidential race in particular. To do so, I provide a brief historical overview of segregated memory since the Civil War, and offer an analysis of Baldwin’s account of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of memory and the impact of myth-histories on African Americans and whites. This is followed by an exposition of Baldwin’s approach to de-segregating memory, as well as the tensions and correspondences between his contributions to addressing mnemonic divides and those of Barack Obama in his “More Perfect Union” speech on race. The essay closes by outlining the political relevance of the theoretical tensions between Baldwin and Obama in an era alleged to have been made “post-racial” by the first black president.

The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign

SUNY Press
September 2010
300 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 1-4384-3659-9; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3659-3
eBook SBN10: 1-4384-3661-0; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3661-6

Edited by:

Heather E. Harris, Associate Professor of Business Communication
Stevenson University, Stevenson, Maryland

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Catherine R. Squires, John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity, and Equality
University of Minnesota

Timely, multidisciplinary analysis of Obama’s presidential campaign, its context, and its impact.

November 4, 2008 ushered in a historic moment: Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. In The Obama Effect, editors Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Catherine R. Squires bring together works that place Barack Obama’s candidacy and victory in the context of the American experience with race and the media. Following Obama’s victory, optimists claimed that the campaign signaled the arrival of an era of postracism and postfeminism in the United States. This collection of essays, all presented at a national conference to discuss the meaning and impact of the nomination of the first presidential candidate of African descent, remind the reader that reaching a point in U.S. history where a biracial man could be deemed “electable” is part of a still-ongoing struggle. It resists the temptation to dismiss the uncertainty, hope, and fear that characterized the events and discourse of the two-year primary and general election cycle and brings together multidisciplinary approaches to assessing “the Obama effect” on public discourse and participation. This volume provides readers with a means for recalling and mapping out the enduring issues that erupted during the campaign—issues that will continue to shape how our society views itself and President Obama in the coming years.

(W)rites of passing: The performance of identity in fiction and personal narratives

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
February 2006
108 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3212756
ISBN: 9780542630743

Tracy L. Vaughn

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2006 Department of English

In my dissertation, “(W)rites of Passing: The Performance of Identity in Fiction and Personal Narratives,” I explore the literary, historical, psychological and cultural dimensions of passing, particularly as it relates to race and class. Through the works of Arnold van Gennep, Stephen Greenblatt, and Victor Turner, I have discovered intriguing comparisons between the forms of “class-passing” presented in 16th and18 th century British novels with 20th and 21st century “race passing” novels.

In much of my work on race passing and African American literature, I argue that while racial passing may have brought certain socio-economic benefits to those who passed (whether temporarily or permanently,) it also invariably forced them to engage in what I would describe as exercises of restraint. These exercises of restraint might manifest themselves in various forms of cultural impotency ranging from a loss and/or repression of emotional expressivity to a more extreme decision to be voluntarily childless—a forced barrenness, if you will. One of the main questions my research attempts to answer is: “Does the act of passing, whether it be through race or class, reinforce the very hierarchy it seems to subvert?” Also, if in fact race and/or class are identities that are performative, then what role does the audience play in permitting individuals to pass? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, I apply performance theory as a lens to provide a clearer and perhaps alternative perspective to the ways in which passing is both implicit (through the individual’s choice to pass) and complicit (through the audience’s suspension of disbelief.) My research questions how much responsibility the audience carries in the passing individual’s effort to pass successfully. At the same time, I discuss how the performance element of improvisation is absolutely necessary in the process and act of passing. What I have defined as the “process of passing” is a variation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage : a performance ritual with “distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups [and individuals] become adjusted to internal changes, and adopt them to their external environment.” Van Gennep’s three phases of separation, transition and incorporation that define a rite of passage serve as the foundation of my definition of the process of passing.

Purchase the dissertation here.