Mixed Race Studies

“SAMO^© as an Escape Clause”: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism

Journal of American Studies
Volume 45, Issue 2  (May 2011)
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875810001738

Laurie A. Rodrigues
Department of English
University of Rhode Island

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene – then he called himself “SAMO.” Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat’s high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat’s work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat’s aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat’s unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat’s active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat’s aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream’s constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat’s “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media’s discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

Read the entire article here.

The mystery, myth and marvel of the Melungeons of East Tennessee

Chattanooga Parent/North Georgia Parent
2012-01-08

Jennifer Crutchfield

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.  Even the youngest of us knows that rhyme but there is more to the story of the conquest of the New World and it was a man’s search for clues to his mysterious illness that may have answered centuries old questions.   Answering those riddles about people and places make history and its mysteries so exciting.
 
Elvis Presley, Pocahontas, Abe Lincoln and Sequoyah may share a bloodline that still exists with many Melungeon brothers who don’t even know it.  As early as 1673 English explorer James Needham wrote about people who lived with Native American tribes, Mediterranean-looking people speaking a broken 16th century Elizabethan English in the forests of the New World.

Dedicated research, advanced genetic typing, testing and a disease or two combined in one man as he battled a mysterious ailment.  Brent Kennedy had always been told that his family was of Irish, Scottish and German heritage.  Imagine his surprise when the source of his pain was diagnosed as Erythema nodosum sarcoidosis, a disease that only strikes Mediterranean men?…

Read the entire article here.

Assessing the Identity of Black Indians in Louisiana: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Louisiana State University
May 2004
193 pages

Francis J. Powell

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy In The School of Social Work

This study shows the existence of Black Indians in Louisiana and investigates whether differences exist between Black Indians who are members of officially recognized tribes and those who do not have any type of recognition. The study examined if a relationship exist between tribal recognition and ethnic identity, subjective well-being, and social support. A cross-sectional survey design was used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain qualitative data. The sample consisted of 60 participants. 30 were from recognized tribal groups and 30 were from non-recognized tribal communities.

The study specifically examined variables related to the perceptions of Black Indians in Louisiana to see if this group perceives themselves to be Black, Indian, or both. The independent variable included demographic characteristics and tribal designation. The dependent variables were ethnic identity, subjective well-being and social support.
 
Results showed that Black Indians in recognized groups had higher levels of Native American identity when compared to their levels of African American identity (p< .01). There were no significant differences in the levels of Native American identity when compared with the African American identity among the non-recognized samples (p< .342). Differences did emerge with respect to income, age, and tribal designation. Results indicated that those Black Indians in recognized tribes were significantly more likely to be younger with higher annual incomes than those Black Indians in non-recognized groups (p < .01).
 
There were no significant differences between the two groups for the variables social support and subjective well-being. Findings imply that “race”, as a social construct, is designed by arbitrary categories that are inconsistent with ethnic heritage or cultural identity development.

Table of Contents

• ACKOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Mixture of African and Native Americans
  • Historical Indian Tribes in Louisiana
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Importance of the Study
  • Operational Definition of Key Concepts
  • Legal Definitions and Racially Mixed People
• 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Empowerment Approach Theory
  • African American Perspective
    • The Black Experience
    • Church and Family
  • Racial Identity Theories
  • Native Americans
    • Precontact
    • Postcontact
    • Cultural Beliefs
    • Indian Identity
    • Who is an Indian?
  • Historiography of Southern Race Relations
  • Theoretical Perspectives on Biracial Individuals
  • Theoretical Perspectives on Ethnicity and Culture
  • Measuring Ethnic Identity
  • Life Satisfaction and Subjective Well-Being
    • Well-Being and Social Support among African Americans
    • Well-Being and Social Support among Native Americans
  • Social Support Theory
  • Literature Review Summary
• 3 METHODOLOGY
  • Conceptual Framework
  • Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
  • Research Design
  • Population and Samples
  • Instrumentation
  • Data Collection Procedure
  • Data Analysis
    • Research Hypothesis
  • Definition of Key Concepts
  • Protection of Human Subjects
  • Purpose of the Research Study
  • Major Research Questions
  • Qualitative Research Process
    • Research Design
    • Instrument
    • Data Collection
• 4 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF QUANTITATIVE SAMPLE
  • Sample Characteristics
  • Univariate Analysis
    • Objective One
      • Recognition
      • Gender
      • Income
      • Age
      • Education
    • Objective Two
    • MEIM (Ethnic Identity and Affirmation, Belonging, Commitment – African American)
    • MEIM (Ethnic Identity and Affirmation, Belonging, Commitment – Indian)
    • Well-Being (Life Satisfaction and Social Status)
    • Social Support
    • Emotional Support (family)
    • Socializing (family)
    • Practical Assistance (family)
    • Financial Assistance (family)
    • Advice/Guidance (family)
    • Emotional Support (friends)
    • Socializing (friends)
    • Practical Assistance (friends)
    • Financial Assistance (friends)
    • Advice/Guidance (friends)
  • Bivariate Analysis
    • Objective Three
• 5 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF QUALITATIVE SAMPLES
  • Sample Characteristics
  • Dual Cultural Identity
  • Racial Dissonance
  • Racism
  • Marginalization
  • Chapter Summary
• 6 QUANITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE FINDINGS: SUMMARY, DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, LIMITATIONS
  • Demographic Variables
  • Ethnic Identity
  • Well-Being (Life Satisfaction and Social Status)
  • Qualitative Findings
  • Implication of Social Work Practice
  • Implication of Social Work Education
  • Limitation of the Study
  • Direction for Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX
  • A. MANDATORY CRITERIA FOR FEDERAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
  • B. RESEARCH STUDY PROJECT INSTRUMENTS
  • C. QUALITATIVE INTERVIEW GUIDE
• Qualitative Interview Guide
• VITA

Read the entire dissertation here.

SML 63: Black Indians: Phil Wilkes Fixico, William Katz

Blogtalk Radio
SundayMorning Live
2012-02-19

Guests:

Phil Wilkes Fixico—African-Native American activist, is a Seminole Maroon Descendant, Creek and Cherokee Freedmen descendant, Honorary Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Texas Seminoles, California Semiroon Mico, Member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th & 10th (horse) Cavalry and the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts of Brackettville, Texas.

William Katz is the author of “Black Indians” and over 40 books on history.  He specializes in the history of Black Indians and the relationships between the two groups.

Download the episode here. (02:00:14)

Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays

The Library of America
2002
939 pages
8.1 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1931082065; ISBN-13: 978-1931082068

Edited by

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

Before Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, before James Weldon Johnson and James Baldwin, Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative exploration of racial identity and his use of African American speech and folklore. Rejecting his era’s genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and “passing,” Chesnutt laid bare the deep contradictions at the heart of American attitudes toward race and history, and in the process created the modern African American novel. The Library of America presents the best of Chesnutt’s fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer’s life.

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of “conjure” tales that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. In such stories as “The Goophered Grapevine” and “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” the storyteller Uncle Julius reveals a world of fantastic powers and occult influence. That same year, Chesnutt published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, a collection set in his native North Carolina that examines the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century.

His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) dramatizes the emotional turmoil and inevitable conflicts brought on racial passing. Through the agonizing fate of Rena Walden, a beautiful woman in search of her own identity, Chesnutt exposes the destructive consequences of the legal and social fictions surrounding race in the post-bellum South.

The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt’s masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a Southern town. Based on the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, the book reveals the political underpinnings of the emerging segregationist status quo through the story of two secretly related families, one black, one white. Neglected in its own time, The Marrow of Tradition has been recognized increasingly as a unique and multilayered depiction of the hidden dynamics of a society giving way to violence.

Nine uncollected short stories, including all the Uncle Julius tales omitted from The Conjure Woman, round out the volume’s fiction. A selection of essays, mixing forceful legal argument and political passion, highlight Chesnutt’s prescient views on the paradoxes and future prospects of race relations in American and the definition of race itself. Also included is the revealing autobiographical essay written late in his life, “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem.”

Table of Contents

• The Conjure Woman [1899]
  • The Goophered Grapevine
  • Po’ Sandy
  • Mars Jeems’s Nightmare
  • The Conjurer’s Revenge
  • Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny
  • The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt
  • Hot-Foot Hannibal
• The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line [1899]
  • The Wife of His Youth
  • Her Virginia Mammy
  • The Sheriff’s Children
  • A Matter of Principle
  • Cicely’s Dream
  • The Passing of Grandison
  • Uncle Wellington’s Wives
  • The Bouquet
  • The Web of Circumstance
• The House Behind the Cedars [1900]
• The Marrow of Tradition [1901]
• Uncollected Stories
  • Dave’s Neckliss [1889]
  • A Deep Sleeper [1893]
  • Lonesome Ben [1900]
  • The Dumb Witness [ca. 1900]
  • The March of Progress [1901]
  • Baxter’s Procrustes [1904]
  • The Doll [1912]
  • White Weeds
  • The Kiss
• Selected Essays
  • What is a White Man [1889]
  • The Future American [1900]
  • Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the Modern South [1901]
  • Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition [1901]
  • The Disfranchisement of the Negro [1903]
  • The Courts and the Negro [1908]
  • Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem [1931]

Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All

truthdig
2012-02-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

A recently released report by the Pew Center is a belated Valentine’s Day gift to interracial families. The report indicates that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the U.S. and the change is a sign that acceptance is growing. Although this is definitely cause for celebration and a reason to continue the fight for marriage equality everywhere, we should remember that a fuller and more accurate historical account of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. should focus on social and legal constraints along with demographic patterns.

One reason why is the large-scale psychological distress experienced by all racial groups resulting from a social and legal history around interracial sex and marriage that’s been fraught with challenges. Legal history tells us that interracial sexual relations have been a troubled issue since the days of colonialism and enslavement, when many African-American women were forced to give birth to mixed race children to increase the enslaved population. This means that a large number of people who can claim interracial heritage do not because they are what multiracial activist Glenn Robinson calls “mixed by force” rather than “mixed by choice.” We must also consider the many free “mixed by choice” families of various backgrounds whose marriages were not recognized in the census records because miscegenation laws got even stricter after the demise of slavery.

Then, there were female members of interracial marriages, such as New York’s Alice Rhinelander in 1925 or California’s Marie Antoinette Monks in 1939, who were accused of fraud so that their marriages could be annulled and so that they could be disinherited. So, we must remember that before the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage in all territories where it was outlawed, interracial coupling was a common practice. That means there may be some validity to the critique that today’s demographic patterns may not represent as much of an increase from historical trends as is being reported. Sadly, this is difficult to prove because there are few historical records to document the trend through its 500-or-more-year history in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.

 The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender

Pew Social and Demographic Trends
Pew Research Center
Washington, DC
2012-02-16
56 pages

Wendy Wang, Research Associate

Note from Steven F. Riley: The Pew Social and Demographic Trends data is report from 2010-06-04 for the year 2008, titled “Marrying Out: One-in-Seven New U.S. Marriages is Interracial or Interethnic” is here.

Page 10 of the report states,

Backdrop and Recent Changes: The increasing popularity of intermarriage in the U.S. happens at a time when fewer people are getting married and the share of adults currently married has reached a historic low. [See the report “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—A Record Low,”]  The number of new marriages in the U.S. has declined from approximately 2.3 million in 2008 to 2.1 million in 2010. Only about half of U.S. adults (51%) are currently married. The share is highest among Asians (61%) and lowest among African Americans (31%), with whites (55%) and Hispanics (48%) in between.

For new marriages in 2008 to 2010 period, black male exogamy increased from 21.7% to 23.6% (from 1 in 5 to 1 in 4) and black female exogamy increased from 8.9% to 9.3% (relatively steady at 1 in 11). Asian male exogamy decreased from 19.5% to 16.6% (from 1 in 5 to 1 in 6) and Asian female exogamy decreased from 39.5% to 36.1% (from 2 in 5 to 2 in 6).

This report contains no data on the “exogamy” of individuals who identify with more than one racial group.

Executive Summary
 
This report analyzes the demographic and economic characteristics of newlyweds who marry spouses of a different race or ethnicity, and compares the traits of those who “marry out” with those who “marry in.” The newlywed pairs are grouped by the race and ethnicity of the husband and wife, and are compared in terms of earnings, education, age of spouse, region of residence and other characteristics. This report is primarily based on the Pew Research Center’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) in 2008-2010 and on findings from three of the Center’s own nationwide telephone surveys that explore public attitudes toward intermarriage. For more information about data sources and methodology, see Appendix 1.

Key findings:

• The increasing popularity of intermarriage. About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%). Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out. Looking at all married couples in 2010, regardless of when they married, the share of intermarriages reached an all-time high of 8.4%. In 1980, that share was just 3.2%.
• Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. About 24% of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. About 36% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17% of Asian male newlyweds. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender.
• At first glance, recent newlyweds who “married out” and those who “married in” have similar characteristics. In 2008-2010, the median combined annual earnings of both groups are similar—$56,711 for newlyweds who married out versus $55,000 for those who married in. In about one-in-five marriages of each group, both the husband and wife are college graduates. Spouses in the two groups also marry at similar ages (with a two- to three-year age gap between husband and wife), and an equal share are marrying for the first time.
• However, these overall similarities mask sharp differences that emerge when the analysis looks in more detail at pairings by race and ethnicity. Some of these differences appear to reflect the overall characteristics of different groups in society at large, and some may be a result of a selection process. For example, white/Asian newlyweds of 2008 through 2010 have significantly higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than do any other pairing, including both white/white ($60,000) and Asian/Asian ($62,000). When it comes to educational characteristics, more than half of white newlyweds who marry Asians have a college degree, compared with roughly a third of white newlyweds who married whites. Among Hispanics and blacks, newlyweds who married whites tend to have higher educational attainment than do those who married within their own racial or ethnic group.
• Intermarriage and earnings. Couples formed between an Asian husband and a white wife topped the median earning list among all newlyweds in 2008-2010 ($71,800). During this period, white male newlyweds who married Asian, Hispanic or black spouses had higher combined earnings than did white male newlyweds who married a white spouse. As for white female newlyweds, those who married a Hispanic or black husband had somewhat lower combined earnings than those who “married in,” while those who married an Asian husband had significantly higher combined earnings.
• Regional differences. Intermarriage in the United States tilts West. About one-in-five (22%) of all newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14% in the South, 13% in the Northeast and 11% in the Midwest. At the state level, more than four-in-ten (42%) newlyweds in Hawaii between 2008 and 2010 were intermarried; the other states with an intermarriage rate of 20% or more are all west of the Mississippi River. (For rates of intermarriage as well as intra-marriage in all 50 states, see Appendix 2.)
• Is more intermarriage good for society? More than four-in-ten Americans (43%) say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while 11% say it has been a change for the worse and 44% say it has made no difference. Minorities, younger adults, the college-educated, those who describe themselves as liberal and those who live in the Northeast or the West are more disposed than others to see intermarriage in a positive light.
• Public’s acceptance of intermarriage. More than one-third of Americans (35%) say that a member of their immediate family or a close relative is currently married to someone of a different race. Also, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, the public was divided about this. Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) said people of different races marrying each other was not acceptable for anyone, and an additional 37% said this may be acceptable for others, but not for themselves. Only one-third of the public (33%) viewed intermarriage as acceptable for everyone.
• Divorce. Several studies using government data have found that overall divorce rates are higher for couples who married out than for those who married in – but here, too, the patterns vary by the racial and gender characteristics of the couples. These findings are based on scholarly analysis of government data on marriage and divorce collected over the past two decades.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Chapter 1: Overview
• Chapter 2: Characteristics of Intermarried Newlyweds
• Chapter 3: Intermarried Couples of Different Cohorts
• Chapter 4: Public Attitudes on Intermarriage
• Appendices
  1. Data & Methodology
  2. State and Regional Rates
  3. Detailed tables

Read the entire report here.

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Stanford University Press
2012-02-29
320 pages
26 illustrations, 5 maps.
Cloth ISBN: 9780804778145; E-book ISBN: 9780804783712

Grace Peña Delgado, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Making the Chinese Mexican is the first book to examine the Chinese diaspora in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It presents a fresh perspective on immigration, nationalism, and racism through the experiences of Chinese migrants in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Navigating the interlocking global and local systems of migration that underlay Chinese borderlands communities, the author situates the often-paradoxical existence of these communities within the turbulence of exclusionary nationalisms.

The world of Chinese fronterizos (borderlanders) was shaped by the convergence of trans-Pacific networks and local arrangements: against a backdrop of national unrest in Mexico and in the era of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States, Chinese fronterizos carved out vibrant, enduring communities that provided a buffer against virulent Sinophobia. This book challenges us to reexamine the complexities of nation-making, identity formation, and the meaning of citizenship. It represents an essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Passing Fancies: Color, much more than race, dominated the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance

The Wall Street Journal
2011-09-03

James Campbell

Harlem Renaissance Novels, Edited by Rafia Zafar, Library of America, 1,715 pages

Harlem in the autumn of 1924 offered a “foretaste of paradise,” according to the novelist Arna Bontemps. He was recalling the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance and was perhaps a little dazzled in retrospect—Bontemps was writing in 1965—by his memories of “strings of fairy lights” illuminating the uptown “broad avenues” at dusk.

A gloomier perspective is found in the writings of James Baldwin, born in Harlem Hospital in August 1924. His novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) and his memoir, “The Fire Next Time” (1963), both evoke a Harlem childhood dominated by poverty, fear, brutality, with the dim torch of salvation locked in a storefront church. Baldwin scarcely mentions the renaissance or its principals in all his writings—despite the remarkable coincidence of his having attended schools where two mainstays of any account of the Harlem Renaissance were teachers: the poet Countee Cullen and the novelist Jessie Redmon…

…Any rebirth is bound to be bloody, and perhaps the better for it. Grudge, guilt and prejudice notwithstanding, the Harlem Renaissance produced a lot of good writing, some of it worth reading eight decades later. Almost all the novels chosen by Rafia Zafar for the Library of America’s two-volume collection contain scenes of interest, even when the interest is mainly sociological. (The exception is George Schuyler’s 1931 “Black No More,” a far-fetched, burlesque yarn about passing for white that might have been omitted in favor of Van Vechten’s “Nigger Heaven.”) The predominant theme of the majority of novels here—to the point of obsession—is not so much prejudice as plain color. Bigoted white voices are heard, but light-skinned blacks expressing distaste for their darker neighbors speak louder. As the heroine of Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” (1928) observes: “Negro society . . . was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society.”

The most arresting tale, in this respect, is “The Blacker the Berry” (1929) by Wallace Thurman, in which poor Emma Lou Morgan, daughter of a “quite fair” mother, realizes that her “luscious black complexion” is despised by those around her, many of whom can pass for white. Emma Lou’s “unwelcome black mask” has been inherited from her “no good” father, who had “never been in evidence.” Ill-treatment from white students and teachers at school is bad enough; but when Emma Lou gets to Harlem, the humiliation turns to cruelty. She tries to rent a room from a West Indian woman. “A little girl had come to the door, and, in answer to a voice in the back asking, ‘Who is it, Cora?’ had replied, ‘monkey chaser wants to see the room you got to rent.’ ” Emma Lou remains, for the time being, homeless. When she shows her admiration “boldly” for an “intelligent-looking, slender, light-brown-skinned” man on Seventh Avenue, he “looked at her, then over her, and passed on.” Far worse are a group of Harlem youths who notice Emma Lou powdering her nose near the same spot…

…It was the same sigh, rather than crude shame, that led Jean Toomer to describe himself on his marriage certificate of 1931 as “white.” His exquisite sequence of prose episodes and poems, “Cane” (1923), is the earliest of the books gathered here. It requires but a sampling of Toomer’s humid Georgia prose to induce in the reader a different quality of intoxication from that brought about by the rough beverages of McKay, Hughes and Schuyler: “Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir.”…

Read the entire review here.