Mixed Race Studies

So… What are You, Anyway

2012 Conference on Multiracial Identity: Exploring Our Roots
Hosted by Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2012-04-06 through 2012-04-07

Welcome to the fourth annual conference on multiracial identity and politics, hosted by the Harvard College Half-Asian People’s Association on April 6 – April 7, 2012.

Join us this year in exploring what it means to be mixed race. This year we are happy to announce Diane Farr as our keynote speaker. Diane Farr last brought her unique sense of humor to Showtime’s CALIFORNICATION as Jill Robinson. Having just finished three years as Agent Megan Reeves on CBS’s NUMB3RS, Farr was thrilled to put her gun down and don a sundress for a comedy. Prior to NUMB3RS, Farr starred on RESCUE ME, as well as THE JOB, THE DREW CAREY SHOW and ROSWELL. Her advice as the sole female on the MTV hit, LOVELINE, is what made her whiskey-soaked voice so recognizable. After 200 episodes of this cult phenomenon, Farr published her first book.

The Girl Code, a comic look at single women in the 21st century has since been sold to seven countries in five languages. Farr’s latest book, Kissing Outside The Lines, hilariously chronicles her path to an interracial marriage. Part of a two book series, Kissing will be followed up next year with Shades of America – which discusses raising biracial children. Diane writes for most American magazines and recently took over Dave Barry’s internationally syndicated column for Herald Tribune Newspapers, writing a comedic comment on pop culture.

We are also happy to welcome Associated Press journalist Jesse Washington and former Harvard Hapa president James Fish as speakers and Sue Lambe, Katie Low, and as discussion leaders…

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race Week by SHADES of CSU

Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado
2012-04-02 through 2012-04-06

Monday, Apr. 2, marks the beginning of the 4th-annual Mixed Race Week, a series of presentations and activities celebrating the multiracial and interracial community at Colorado State University.
 
This annaul event is sponsored by Shades of CSU, an organization dedicated to multiracial students…one of a few of its kind in the country.

For more information, click here.

Daniel Sharfstein wins 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Vanderbilt Law School News
Vanderbilt University
2012-03-16

Daniel Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for his sensitive account of the fine line people of mixed race have tread in the United States since the nation’s beginning, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011).
 
“[The Invisible Line] makes real the fact that, not so long ago, American citizens were forced into hiding their lineage and identity just to live free in this democracy, the perils and sense of loss, no matter which road they chose, and the price being paid even to this day by their descendants, and by extension, all of us,” the judges said in a press release issued by Columbia and Harvard universities.
 
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, established in 1998 in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist J. Anthony Lukas, is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognizes excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of its namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. Sharfstein will receive the award prize of $10,000 on May 1, 2012, at a ceremony at Harvard University.

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Sharfstein chronicles the history of three African American families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities, starting in the 17th century. The book is a result of Sharfstein’s research on the legal history of race in the United States and on dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their racial identity and create new lives. He found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans and document their migration across the racial divide…

Read the entire new release here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

The Penguin Press
2011-02-17
416 pages
6.14 x 9.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.

In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Three American families’ stories…

The Gibsons
The Gibsons were among the first free people of color in seventeenth-century Virginia, most of whom were free because their mothers were English and by law slavery followed the status of the mother. In the early l700s, as Virginia’s laws made it increasingly difficult for free blacks to own property and earn a living, the Gibsons left the colony for the southern frontier. When the Gibsons reached South Carolina in the 1730s, the colonial assembly worried.that they had come to organize a slave revolt. But after personally interviewing the family, the colonial governor granted them hundreds of acres of land in a Welsh and Scots-Irish community. After one generation they were neither black nor white-they were planters. In the nineteenth century, they rose to the heights of the Southern aristocracy. They sent their sons to Yale and had vast holdings of land and slaves near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lexington, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Gibsons were rebel officers, powerful opponents of Reconstruction, and leaders of the New South.’ One became a United States Senator from Louisiana.

The Spencers
The Spencers’ story begins in the Appalachian Mountains. In an area that had more slaves and more free blacks than anywhere else in eastern Kentucky-largely because of a bustling salt mining industry there in the early 1800s-two free men of color began having children with a pair of white sisters who had recently moved from South Carolina. Shortly before one man, George Freeman, was prosecuted for interracial sex, the other man, Jordan Spencer-possibly Freeman’s brother or son-moved with his family one hundred miles deeper into the mountains. Even though he was visibly dark-skinned, his new community in Johnson County, Kentucky, decided that he could be white. His family hovered on the line between black and white for the rest of the century, farming and logging in a mountain hollow before heading into the coal mines.

The Walls
The Walls trace their roots to a wealthy plantation owner in Rockingham, North Carolina. Stephen Wall never married, but he had children with three of his slaves, In the 1830s and 1 840s, he freed his children and sent them to Ohio to be raised by radical Quaker abolitionists. He bought land for them, generously supported their education at places like Oberlin College, and willed them a lot of money. No one knows why. He kept their mothers in bondage. The children became ardent abolitionists and served in the Union Army and Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War, several moved to Washington, D.C., where they fought for civil rights and women’s rights and raised their families to expect nothing less than equality. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, their children disappeared into the white world.

“Teachable Moments”: The Use of Child-Centered Arguments in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

California Law Review
Volume 98, Issue 1 (February 2010)
pages 121-158

Ruth Butterfield Isaacson, Associate
Leland, Parachini, Steinberg, Matzger & Melnick LLP, San Francisco

Child-centered arguments have played a central role in debates over expanding marriage rights throughout history. Opponents of interracial marriage argued in Loving v. Virginia that “mixed race” children from interracial households were physically and psychologically inferior and suffered from social stigmatization. Over forty years later, child-centered arguments again took center stage in the debate over same-sex marriage. The arguments initially focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer from stunted development and social alienation. Over the years, these arguments gradually morphed into claims that same-sex marriage harms all children, because the prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration in school curriculum confuses children about gender roles and the “true” meaning of marriage. Tracing the evolution of child-centered arguments from Loving through the recent battle for same-sex marriage in California’s November 2008 election on Proposition 8 offers valuable lessons to same-sex marriage advocates about the propriety and consequences of using child-centered arguments in defining the marriage rights of adults.

INTRODUCTION

It really is what we call a teachable moment.
—Interim Director of the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, describing a first-grade field trip to City Hall to watch a lesbian wedding.

On Friday, October 10, 2008, a group of first-grade children from the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco took a field trip to City Hall. The children’s first-grade teacher, a lesbian, was set to marry her longtime girlfriend that morning. The director of the charter school saw the wedding as a “teachable moment”—an opportunity for the children to witness firsthand the progression of civil rights in America.

Many same-sex marriage advocates heralded the first graders’ excursion as another step toward the full acceptance and integration of same-sex individuals in society. But other supporters worried that the field trip, while well intentioned, was ill timed and potentially damaging to the same-sex marriage cause. At that time, the debate over same-sex marriage had reached a significant crossroads. Earlier that year, the California Supreme Court issued a landmark decision declaring that a same-sex marriage ban violated both the due process and equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage responded quickly and forcefully with Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to amend the California Constitution to define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman. On the day of the field trip, polls on Proposition 8 showed close to a dead heat on the issue. Many same-sex marriage advocates feared that the “teachable moment” played directly into the hands of their opponents, giving them new leverage that could ultimately shift momentum in favor of Proposition 8.

Not surprisingly, just one week later, the field trip became the target of new television advertisements supporting Proposition 8. The leading organization behind the Proposition 8 campaign, ProtectMarriage.com, had cautioned for months that state recognition of same-sex marriage would, among other things, force public schools to include teaching same-sex marriage in their curriculum. In their view, the field trip was concrete and visible evidence that their fears had been realized. Playing on those fears, their ad took advantage of news footage of the wedding, particularly footage of a first-grade girl who appeared sad, and almost confused, by her teacher’s lesbian wedding. This lasting image was paired with the warning that “children will be taught about gay marriage unless we vote yes on Proposition 8.” The ad first aired on October 28, 2008; Proposition 8 passed by a 52-48 margin exactly one week later on November 4, 2008.

Appeals to child welfare are neither new nor exclusive to the same-sex marriage debate. Such appeals have also been raised in other family law disputes, most notably the fight for interracial marriage during the era of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court decision striking down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Opponents of interracial marriage claimed that the “mixed-race” children produced by interracial couples were biologically inferior, suffered abnormal social and psychological development, and endured stigmatization by their peers. Similarly, opponents of same-sex marriage have wielded such claims for almost two decades, although the substance of their child-based fears has evolved. Like the early arguments used by interracial marriage opponents, the first child-centered arguments in the same-sex marriage debate focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer stunted social and psychological development and face stigmatization by their peers. Over the years, these concerns gradually morphed into fears about how same-sex marriage harms all children, because the increasing prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration into school curricula confuse children about gender roles and the true meaning of marriage.

This Comment examines modern views of marriage and how child-centered appeals have influenced the discourse on expanding marital rights, particularly within the context of Loving v. Virginia, Goodridge v. Dep’t of Public Health, Hernandez v. Robles, In re Marriage Cases, the battle over Proposition 8 in California, and supporting case law and legislation. These sources evince an evolution in judicial conceptions of marriage and the childbased arguments that have been used to expand or constrict such conceptions, from anxiety over “mixed-race” children during the fight for interracial marriage to concerns in the same-sex marriage debate about the psycho-social well-being of children raised by same-sex parents and, ultimately, the effects of same-sex marriage on public school curricula. The Comment concludes with an analysis of modern marriage as defined by courts and society today, the intersection of Proposition 8’s success with contemporary marital attitudes, and the role of the judiciary in the fate of same-sex marriage…

…In defending its ban on interracial marriage, Virginia appealed to many of the same child-centered arguments that motivated the enactment of the ban 276 years earlier. In its brief to the Supreme Court, Virginia declared that states have an interest in preserving the “purity of the races and in preventing the propagation of half-breed children.” Acknowledging the reality of persistent racism, Virginia claimed its interest in keeping the races “pure” stemmed not from the repulsion interracial children invoke in society, but rather from the idea that interracial children were seen as outcasts and would be “burdened . . . with ‘a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’” Virginia also emphasized the socioscientific consequences to interracial children, including the domination of racial inferiorities within children of mixed race and the social tension that it claimed was created when races of different socioeconomic backgrounds formed a family. Interracial couples also experienced higher divorce rates, Virginia argued, which would have negative effects on the (interracial) children produced by and raised within these families…

Read the entire article here.

Black-White Marital Matching: Race, Anthropometrics, and Socioeconomics

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6196
December 2011
34 pages

Pierre-André Chiappori, E. Rowan and Barbara Steinschneider Professor of Economics
Columbia University

Sonia Oreffice, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

Climent Quintana-Domeque, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

We analyze the interaction of race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the U.S. marriage market, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1999 to 2009 for black, white, and inter-racial couples. We consider the anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, together with their wage and education, and estimate who inter-racially marries whom along these dimensions. Distinctive patterns arise by gender and race for inter-married individuals: the black women who inter-marry are the thinner and more educated in their group; instead, white women are the fatter and less educated; black or white men who inter-marry are poorer and thinner. While women in “mixed” couples find a spouse who is poorer but thinner than if they intra-married, black men match with a white woman who is more educated than if they intra-married, and a white man finds a thinner spouse in a black woman.

Read the entire paper here.

Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line: Collected Stories

Penguin Classics
June 2000
304 pages
5.23 x 7.59in
Paperback ISBN: 9780141185026

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Edited by:

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Unlike the popular “Uncle Remus” stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt’s tales probe psychological depths in black people unheard of before in Southern regional writing. They also expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence, and moral compromise.

This important collection contains all the stories in his two published volumes, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, along with two uncollected works: the tragic “Dave’s Neckliss” and “Baxter’s Procustes,” Chesnutt’s parting shot at prejudice.

Why race still matters

Dædalus
Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
Pages 102-116
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124460

Ian Hacking, Professor of Philosphy
University of Toronto

Why has race mattered in so many times and places? Why does it still matter? Put more precisely, why has there been such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race and to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? Call this the ‘first question.’ Of course there are many more questions that one must also ask: Why has racial oppression been so ubiquitous? Why racial exploitation? Why racial slavery? Perhaps we lend to think of races as essentially different just because we want to excuse or to justify’ the domination of one race by another.

I shall proceed with the first question by canvassing live possible answers to it that variously invoke nature, genealogy (in the sense of Michel Foucault), cognitive science, empire, and pollution rules.

One final preliminary remark is in order. Most parts of this essay could have been written last year or next year, but the discussion of naturalism, medicine, and race could only have been written in November of 2004. and may well be out of date by the time this piece is printed.

Why has the category of race been so pervasive? One answer says that the distinction is just there, in the world for all to see. Superficial differences between races do exist in nature, and these are readily recognized.

The naturalist agrees at once that the distinctions are less in the nature of things than they once were, thanks to interbreeding among people whose ancestors have come from geographically distinct blocks. Racial distinctions are particularly blurred where one population has been translated by force to live in the midst of another population and yet has not been assimilated—slaves taken from West Africa and planted in the Southern United States, for example. The naturalist notes that traditional racial distinctions are less and less viable the more children are born to parents whose geographical origins are very different.

Sensible naturalists stop there. The belief that racial differences are anything more than superficial is a repugnant. John Stuart Mill was the wisest spokesman for this position…

…In the United States, the National Bone Marrow Program maintains the master registry. Most people in existing registries have tended to be middle-aged and white, which means that whites have a good chance of finding a match. Hence there have been racially targeted programs for Asian and African Americans. In the United States and Canada there is also the Aboriginal Bone Marrow Registries Association, and in the United Kingdom there is the African Caribbean Leukemia Trust. Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches has been very successful, especially in the Los Angeles region. The African Americans Uniting for Life campaign has been less successful, for all sorts of historical reasons. An African American with leukemia has a far worse chance of finding a match in time than members of other populations have. That is a social fact, but there is also a biological fact: there is far greater heterogeneity in the human leukemia antigen in persons of African origins than in other populations. (This fact fits well with the hypothesis that all races are descendants of only one of many African populations that existed at the time that human emigration began out of Africa—populations whose characteristics have continued to be distributed among Africans today.)

If you go to the websites for the organizations that maintain the registries, you will see they do not shilly-shally in some dance of euphemistic political correctness about race. For them it is a matter of life and death. Without the Asian registries there would have been many more dead Asian Americans in the past decade. For lack of more African Americans on the registries there will be more dead African Americans in the next few years than there need be…

…How much more powerful pollution and the imperial imperative become when history puts them together! Pollution rules are important for maintaining the imperial group intact. As soon as pollution rules break down, men of the master group sire children with women from subjugated groups, and a new kind of person–the half-breed–emerges. The etymology of words such as ‘Eurasian’ embodies this phenomenon. We learn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaedia that ‘Eurasian’ was “originally used to denote children born to Hindu mothers and European (especially Portuguese) fathers.” There are pecking orders between conquerors, as well as among the conquered–and this British word was a put-down meant to keep the Portuguese in Goa in their place. Note also the dominance order between the sexes: a Hindu father and a European woman would yield, at least in the official reckoning, a Hindu, not a Eurasian.

The French noun métis, derived from a Portuguese word originally used for Eurasians, dates back to 1615. In French Canada it signified the children of white fathers and native mothers. Early in the nineteenth century it was adopted in English to denote the offspring of French Canadian men, originally trapper/traders, and native women. In other words, ‘Eurasian’ and métis alike meant the children of males from conquering groups of lower status and females from the totally subjugated groups–and then the offspring of any of those children.

For a few generations, one can be precise in measuring degrees of pollution. At that the Spanish and Portuguese Empires excelled. First came ‘mulattoes,’ the children of Spanish or Portuguese men and South American Indian women. With the importation of black slaves from West Africa, the label was transferred to the children of white masters and black slaves, and then to mixed race in general. The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] says it all: the English word is derived from Portuguese and Spanish, “mulato, young mule, hence one of mixed race.”

The Spanish cuarteron became the English ‘quadroon,’ the child of a white person and a mulatto. The few quotations given in the OED are a record of colonial history. Here is the first, dated 1707: “The inhabitants of Jamaica are for the most part Europeans … who are the Masters, and Indians, Negroes, Mulatos, Alcatrazes, Mestises, Quarterons, & c. who are the slaves.” The next quotation in the list is from Thomas Jefferson.

And so on: from Spanish the English language acquired ‘quintroon,’ meaning one who is one-sixteenth of Negro descent. The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica has it that “The children of a white and a quintroon consider themselves free of all taint of the negro race.” More importantly, from an 1835 OED citation, “‘The child of a Quintroon by a white father is free by law.’ Such was recently the West-Indian slave code.” Better to have a white father than a white mother.

In real life, interbreeding was endemic, so such classifications were bound to become haphazard. Only one option was left. The American solution was definitive. One drop of Negro blood sufficed to make one Negro. Which in turn implied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not, a choice turned into literature in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and, more recently, in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The one drop of blood rule perfectly harmonizes the imperial imperative and the preservation of group identity by pollution prohibitions.

Why is there such a widespread tendency to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? That was our first question…

Read the entire article here.

Of Matters Very Much Related: Trayvon Martin, “Multiracial” Identity, and the Perils of Being Black, Breathing, and Nearby

We Are Respectable Negroes
2012-03-19

Chauncey DeVega

Scholars have long maintained that race is merely a social construct, not something fixed into our nature, yet this insight hasn’t made it any less of a factor in our lives. If we no longer participate in a society in which the presence of black blood renders a person black, then racial self-identification becomes a matter of individual will.

And where the will is involved, the question of ethics arises. At a moment when prominent, upwardly mobile African-Americans are experimenting with terms like “post-black,” and outwardly mobile ones peel off at the margins and disappear into the multiracial ether, what happens to that core of black people who cannot or do not want to do either?

Trayvon Martin was killed for the crime of being black, young, and “suspicious.” Like many other young black boys and grown men throughout United States history, he was shot dead for the crime of possessing an innocuous object (and likely daring to be insufficiently compliant to someone who imagined that they had the State’s permission to kill people of color without consequence or condemnation).

The facts are still playing themselves out. From all appearances, the police have failed to investigate the incident properly. Trayvon Martin’s family has been denied the reasonable care, respect, and response due to them by the local authorities. Observers and activists have gravitated towards racism as the prime motive for the shooting and murder of a young black boy by a grown man and self-styled mall cop, Charles Bronson, Dirty Harry wannabe vigilante.

Common sense renders a clear judgement here: if a black man shot and killed a white kid for holding a bag of Skittles he would already be under the jail; in this instance, the police are operating from a position where a young African American is presumed “guilty,” and his murderer is assumed innocent.

Yes, race matters in the killing of Trayvon Martin. However, and I will explore this in a later post, it is significant in a manner that is much more pernicious than the simple calculus of whether to shoot a young black boy for some imagined grievance or offense—as opposed to being asked a question, or perhaps sternly talked to. The latter is also problematic: it assumes that black people’s citizenship and humanity are forever questionable, and subject to evaluation, by any person who happens to not be African American…

The sociological imagination draws many connections. To point, Trayvon Martin’s murder is also a surprising (and for many, counter-intuitive) complement to The New York Times’ excellent series of essays on race, interracial marriage, and identity.

As someone who has loved across the colorline, and also believes that there are many ways to create a family, I have always held fast to a simple rule.

In this society, in this moment, and given what we know about how race impacts life chances, if a white person is going to have a child with a person of color (especially one who is African American or “black”), a parent is committing malpractice if they do not give their progeny the spiritual, emotional, philosophical, and personal armor to deal with the realities of white supremacy.

By implication, young black and brown children must be made to understand that they are not “special,” “biracial,” or part of a racial buffer group that is going to be given “special” privileges because one of their parents is white. These “multiracial” children are some of the most vulnerable and tragic when they are finally forced to confront the particular challenges which come with being a young black boy or girl in American society. In post civil rights America, this notion is politically incorrect. Nonetheless, it remains true.

Here, Thomas Chatterton Williams offers a great comment on blackness and the dilemma of “post-black” identity:

Still, as I envision rearing my own kids with my blond-haired, blue-eyed wife, I’m afraid that when my future children — who may very well look white — contemplate themselves in the mirror, this same society, for the first time in its history, will encourage them not to recognize their grandfather’s face. For this fear and many others, science and sociology are powerless to console me — nor can they delineate a clear line in the sand beyond which identifying as black becomes absurd.

Question: what happens for those young people who do not see themselves as “black” or “brown,” yet run into the deadly fists of white racism? Do they have the skill sets necessary to survive such encounters whole of life and limb?…

Read the entire essay here.

A troubled experiment’s forgotten lesson in racial integration

Point Reyes Light
Point Reyes Station, California
2012-03-15

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

The year 2012 marks the fortieth anniversary of my Puerto Rican mother and Irish-Italian father’s unusual wedding. They met and married in an experimental community called Synanon, where I was born. Readers might remember Synanon as the founding model of the therapeutic community, but they are more likely to recall its tragic retreat into a cultish enclave near Tomales Bay. What few people know, however, is that Synanon committed itself to a program of racial integration throughout the 1960’s and 70’s. While it belongs to a bygone era of social experimentation, its deliberate effort to foster a racially inclusive society was an experiment worth remembering.

Chuck Dederich, a charismatic recovered alcoholic, started Synanon in southern California in 1958 to lift drug users out of addiction and despair. Not long after, Dederich began to envision its mission more broadly. Synanon, he proclaimed, would promote “a lifestyle that makes possible the kind of communication between people that must exist if we are to prevent this planet from turning into uninhabitable ghettos.” In the 60’s and early 70’s it grew rapidly in size and prominence.

Synanon members, who came from every racial, religious and class background imaginable, lived and worked side by side. They also came together in “the game,” a form of no-holds-barred group encounter therapy that was the focal point of Synanon’s rehabilitation regime. At once intimate and confrontational, the game allowed people from all walks of life, and especially whites and blacks, to encounter each other in ways that would have been unimaginable elsewhere…

…As a result, I grew up surrounded by white, black and multi-racial kids. Because everything from toys and clothes to showers and mealtimes were shared, a sense of equality structured my relationships with my peers. Even as a child I was aware that many things weren’t ideal about Synanon and its ever-changing philosophies and dictums, but my early years in a multi-racial community, where mixed marriages and multi-racial identities were normalized, have shaped me for the better in ways I will probably never fully understand…

Read the entire article here.