Mixed Race Studies

Born Along the Racial Fault Line

The New York Times
2011-11-06

Janet Maslin

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir By Mark Whitaker. Illustrated. 357 pages. Simon & Schuster.

As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.

“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”

Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told…

Read the entire review here.

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Cambridge University Press
September 1993
396 pages
228 x 152 mm
ISBN: 9780521458757
DOI: 10.2277/0521458757

Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two world wars, when the definition of race as a biological concept was replaced by a cultural notion of race. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote about race between the wars, Dr. Barkan argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies of race came from the inclusion of outsiders—women, Jews, and leftists—into the mainstream of scientific discourse.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY
  • 1. Constructing a British identity
    • Colors into races. A transition to modern British anthropology. The founding fathers. Mummies, bones and stones. The shift in British archaeology. A British glimpse at race relations.
  • 2. American diversity
    • Haunted sentinels. European skulls and the primitive mind. The Boasians. American physical anthropology. The politics of coexistence. Dionysia in the Pacific.
• PART II: BIOLOGY
  • 3. In search of a biology of race
    • NewGenics. The statistician’s fable. Race crossing in Jamaica. A Canadian in London: rigid Reginald Ruggles Gates.
  • 4. The limit of traditional reform
    • A racist liberal: Julian Huxley’s early years. Herbert Spencer Jennings and progressive eugenics. A conservative critique: Raymond Pearl. Bridging race formalism and population genetics.
  • 5. Mitigating racial differences
    • Lancelot Hogben. “Africa view” – Huxley’s changing perspectives. J. B. S. Haldane: a defiant aristocrat. Medicine and eugenics: expanding the environment. Eugenics reformed.
• PART III: POLITICS
  • 6. Confronting racism: scientists as politicians
    • 1933 – Early hesitations. Britain – Race and Culture Committee. We Europeans. The American scene. An international interlude. The Paris Congress. The population committee. Out of the closet.
• EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index

Obama and the complexities of identity

The San Diego Union-Tribune
2008-06-19

Bey-Ling Sha, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
San Diego State University

In a recent commentary titled “What He Overcame,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson described Barack Obama as a “young, black, first-term senator.” In her campaign-suspension speech, Hillary Clinton said, “Could an African-American really be our president? . . . Sen. Obama has answered that one.” These descriptions of Obama are typical of many others offered by and reported in the news media.

What’s wrong with these descriptions of Obama as being black or African-American? As others have already noted, these descriptions reify the supposedly outdated “one-drop rule,” whereby any individual with even “one drop” of African heritage was considered black.

A second, related problem is that these descriptions are instances of identity ascription, whereby one person assigns an identity to another person, usually based on physical characteristics. Thus, someone with blond hair and blue eyes is usually called “white,” even if that person has African, Asian or Native American heritage somewhere in his or her background…

Read the entire article here.

Baseline Study on Diversity Segments: Multirace Americans

Institute for Public Relations
Gainesville, Florida
January 2008
15 pages

Bey-Ling Sha, Ph.D., APR, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
San Diego State University

Sponsored in part by ConAgra Foods, Inc.

Public relations practitioners and scholars need to consider multirace Americans as an increasingly important public, with identities, motivations, and concerns unique unto themselves. This project benchmarks extant scholarship and government data regarding multirace Americans, and it articulates the implications of the research findings for public relations practice in the areas of long-term, strategic planning; new market opportunities; and respect and sensitivity.

Read the entire report here.

Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America

University of Southern California
August 2009
311 pages

Ruth Blandón

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ interest in Latin America and their attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and sexual anxieties.

The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas—whether real or fantastical—in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws, one-drop rules, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an “all-American” poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation “American,” and of a son of the Americas.

The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One:
  • Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way
  • Blackness under the law
  • James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two:
  • Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Historical Context
  • From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue
  • Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil
  • Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia
  • Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality
• Chapter Three:
  • All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s Construction and Deconstruction of the Self
  • Cultural Context—Casta and Passing
  • Blurring Cultural Boundaries: “Only the whites of my eyes were affected.”
  • The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched…”
  • In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.”
  • Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!”
  • Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.”
• Chapter Four:
  • “Look Homeward Angel Now”: Travel, Translation, and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home
  • Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—1907-1948: Mexico
  • Cuba
  • Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain
  • Translation, Analogy, and the “I”
  • Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba
  • The Translations
  • Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home”
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932.
• Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907.
• Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926.
• Figure 4: “Blues.” Archibald Motley, 1929.
• Figure 5: “An Idyll of the Deep South.” Aaron Douglas, 1934.
• Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
• Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949.
• Figure 8: The Williams Family
• Figure 9: “De Español y Mulata; Morisca.” [“From Spaniard and Mulatto, Morisca.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 10: “De Mestizo y d India; Coyote.”[“From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903.
• Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams
• Figure 13: Langston Hughes
• Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932.
• Figure 15: Nicolás Guillén

Read the entire dissertation here.

My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots

Basic Civitas Books
2007-01-02
352 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780465015740; ISBN-10: 0465015743

Thulani Davis

Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, acclaimed African-American novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the “white folk” in her family, a Scots-Irish family of cotton planters unknown to her-and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Her journey challenges us to examine the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white, and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative.

Hypodescent: A history of the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States, 1880-1940

Princeton University
September 2011
383 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3480237
ISBN: 9781124939179

Scott Leon Washington

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

This dissertation examines the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States between 1880 and 1940. The “one-drop rule” is a colloquial expression, a phrase which reflects the belief that a person bearing a trace of African ancestry (literally, a single drop of black or Negro “blood”) is black. Historians and social scientists have tended to assume that, as a principle of classification, the one-drop rule can be traced back to the institution of slavery. This study provides a different account. Using a variety of methods, it attempts to explain how the one-drop rule developed, when it became institutionalized, and why. It also adopts a new approach to the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, an approach based largely although by no means exclusively on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The study in its present form has been limited to five chapters. Chapter One explores the origins and development of the one-drop rule, while Chapter Two provides a detailed reading of the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three provides a quantitative account of the country’s history of anti-miscegenation legislation, while Chapter Four examines the role lynching played in the South as a means of social demarcation. The study ends in Chapter Five with a brief synopsis, an inquiry into the relationship between slavery and democracy, and a nonpartisan look at the legacy of the one-drop rule.

Contents

• Abstract
• Maps and Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I. Introduction: A Prehistory of the Present
  • 1.1. An American Anomaly
  • 1.2. The Origins and Development of the One-Drop Rule
  • 1.3. An Outline of the Argument
  • 1.4. Words about Words
  • 1.5. References
• II. The Blood of Homer Plessy
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Digression: The Virtues of Virtual History
  • 2.3. The Wider Context
  • 2.4. Plessy v. Ferguson: Background Information
  • 2.5. The Tourgée Brief
  • 2.6. The Majority Opinion
  • 2.7. Counterfactual Scenario
  • 2.8. Plausibility Defense
  • 2.9. Conclusion
  • 2.10. References
• III. Crossing the Line
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. A Brief History of Laws Prohibiting Interracial Sex and Marriage
  • 3.3. Trends in Anti-Miscegenation Activity
  • 3.4. Data and Methods
  • 3.5. Results
  • 3.6. Discussion
  • 3.7. Conclusion
  • 3.8. References
  • 3.9. Appendix
• IV. The Killing Fields Revisited: Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Lynching: Background Information
  • 4.3. Anti-Miscegenation Legislation: Background Information
  • 4.4. The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: A Review of the Literature
  • 4.5. Data and Methods
  • 4.6. Results
  • 4.7. Discussion
  • 4.8. Conclusion
  • 4.9. References
• V. Conclusion: The Legacy of the One-Drop Rule
  • 5.1. Permanence and Change
  • 5.2. Synopsis
  • 5.3. Slavery and Democracy
  • 5.4. A Final Note
  • 5.5. References

Maps and Figures

• 3.1A. Colonies Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776
• 3.1B. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1861
• 3.1C. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1877
• 3.1D. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1938
• 3.1E. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1913
• 3.3B. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1927
• 3.4A. Statutory Definitions, 1861
• 3.4B. Statutory Definitions, 1877
• 3.4C. Statutory Definitions, 1938
• 3.5A. Statutory Penalties, 1861
• 3.5B. Statutory Penalties, 1877
• 3.5C. Statutory Penalties, 1938
• 3.6. Punishments Against Secondary Parties, 1938
• 3.7. Racial Coverage of Laws Prohibiting Miscegenation, 1938
• 3.8. Appellate Litigation Concerning Definitions of Race, 1776-2000
• 3.9A-G. Severity of Definitions, 1880-1940
• 3.10A-G. Severity of Penalties, 1880-1940
• 4.1. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
• 4.2. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, Integrated Trends, 1882-1930
• 4.3. The Moving Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Constant Dollar Price for Cotton, 1882-1930
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.2B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.3A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.3B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000

TABLES

• 1.1. The Longue Durée of the One-Drop Rule, 1619-2000
• 3.1. Percent of Colonies, Territories, and States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776-1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Average Severity of Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.3B. Average Severity of Definitions, Excluding States without Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4A. Average Severity of Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4B. Average Severity of Penalties, Excluding States without Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.5. Expected Relationships
• 3.6. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Anti-Miscegenation Activity on Selected Variables
• 3.7. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Definitions on Selected Variables
• 3.8. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Penalties on Selected Variables
• 3.9. Racial Categories Used by the United States Census Bureau, 1880-1940
• 3.10. Growth of the Decennial Census, 1880-1940
• 3.11A. Significant Cases, 1810-1894
• 3.11B. Significant Cases, 1895-1972
• 4.1. ARMA (1,1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.2. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.3. The Impact of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Market for Southern Cotton Before and After 1900
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2. Black-White Intermarriage Rates, 1970-2000
• 5.3. Total Population by Number of Races Reported, 2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000
• 5.5. Multiple-Race Population, 2000

Purchase the dissertation here.

Psychology Major Publishes Analysis of Racial Dynamics in the Wizarding World

James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Department of Psychology
2011-10-20

Jordan Pye

When a fan asked her about the political allegories in her book series, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said, “I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world.”

By exploring this idea, one senior psychology student, Christina Thai, put her love for Harry Potter to use in a comparison of how societies perceive people of mixed racial backgrounds. Her work will be published in “A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation,” a compilation by students who applied concepts in the series to their own fields of study. Thai’s chapter is called “Harry Potter and Blood Status: A Psychological Look at Blood Stratification in the Wizarding World,” which she compares the racial dynamics in Harry Potter’s wizarding world to the historical relationship between European Americans and African Americans in the United States…

…Thai, a native of Fairfax, Va. with a second major in biology, found inspiration for the topic during her first semester of research in the Cultural and Racial Diversity Studies lab with Dr. Matthew Lee. After studying racial identity and discrimination, Thai built upon alumnus Candace Vanderpoel’s honors thesis research on hypodescent among African Americans and Asians. This concept is the belief that a bi-racial person has both minority and majority race heritage, but their minority identity overshadows their majority status, so their community considers them a minority.

Thai translated this idea to social hierarchy in the Harry Potter series, where witches and wizards of “pure blood” descent have a higher status than Muggles, who have no magical heritage, and the “mudbloods,” who have a mix of wizard and Muggle parents. Harry himself had a wizard father and a witch mother who was born a Muggle. Thai mainly focused on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the series where Voldemort assumes power of the Ministry of Magic and enacts laws that promote pure blood status and discriminate against Muggles and mudbloods…

Read the entire article here.

Call for Proposals: Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

National Park Service
Network to Freedom
2012-06-20 through 2012-06-24
St. Augustine, Florida

Call for proposal deadline is Sunday, 2012-01-15, 23:59 PST (Local Time).

The 2012 Conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.

Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.

Other topics of interest include stories of southern freedom seekers during the War of 1812 and the American Civil War in commemoration of the 200^th and 150^th anniversaries, respectively, as well as the American Revolutionary War. The conference will also commemorate the 450^th anniversary of the City of St. Augustine’s founding and the important role of Africans to this history.

Submission Procedures

Proposals should be submitted on the attached form by email (2012NationalUGRRConference@oah.org) to the Organization of American Historians, beginning October 2011. Complete panel proposals should include no more than 3 presenters, and a chair/moderator or commentator. Commentators may be omitted in order for the audience to serve in that role. Each participant will receive 20 minutes for his or her presentation. Session membership should be limited by the need to include substantial time for audience questions and comments. Individual submissions that are accepted will be placed on a panel by the Program Committee.

All proposals must include the following information:

• a complete mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, and affiliation for each participant;
• an summary of no more than 500 words, required only for panel proposals;
• a description of no more than 250 words for each presentation; and
• bio/vita of no more than 250 words for each participant.

Submission Deadline

The deadline for proposals is Sunday, January 15, 2012, by 11:59 pm PST.

For more information, click here.

Living the Multiracial Experience: Shifting Racial Expressions, Resisting Race, and Seeking Community

Qualitative Social Work
Volume 11, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 42-60
DOI: 10.1177/1473325010375646

Kelly Faye Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

The growing presence and visibility of mixed race persons in the US demands that social workers critically examine and understand the complexity of multiracial identity. This qualitative investigation examined the narratives of ten multiracial adults about their identity experiences living as multiracial persons. Utilizing paradigmatic analysis of narratives, five major themes emerged. Four of these themes correspond to categories found in existing multiracial scholarship, and include: (1) Shifting racial/ethnic expressions; (2) Racial/ethnic ambiguity; (3) Feeling like an outsider; and (4) Seeking community. The final theme, (5) Racial resistance, contributes new knowledge to our understanding of how multiracial individuals respond to societal pressures to conform to traditional means of categorizing others by race. Findings from this study confirm a collective multiracial experience; one with direct ties to the social and environmental pressures associated with having a multifaceted identity in a color-conscious society. Practice implications and directions for future research are offered.

Read or purchase the article here.