Mixed Race Studies

A First Time for Everything

The New York Times Magazine
The Lives They Lived
2011-12-22

Isabel Wilkerson

While poring over the Web site Legacy.com to prepare this issue, we noticed a trend. A search of the site’s database — which includes obituaries from more than 750 newspapers across the country—turned up hundreds of obits published in 2011 with one phrase in common.

A single thread appears and reappears, as a headline or an afterthought, in the final words written by the families of more than 300 people who departed this earth in the past year. In each of these obituaries was a phrase that read something like this: “The first black American to . . .” or “The first African-American .”

Eugene King was the first African-American milk-delivery man in the Gary, Ind., area. Eddie Koger was the first black bus driver in the state of South Carolina. Camillus Wilson was the first African-American meter reader for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Nancy Hodge-Snyder was said to have “had the distinction of being the first black registered nurse in Kalamazoo.”

I scan the list, a spreadsheet of names and obituary excerpts, and cannot stop reading. How mundane the positions were, how modest the dreams had been. Added together, they somehow bear witness to how far the country has come and how it got to where it is. They speak to how many individual decisions had to be made, how many chances taken, the anxiety and second-guessing at the precise instant that each of these people was hired for whatever humble or lofty position they sought…

…Summie Briscoe was the first black certified automobile mechanic in Cleveland County, N.C. Harriet Braxton was the first African-American female housing inspector in the city of Harrisburg, Pa. Wilbert Coleman was the first African-American narcotics detective in Hackensack, N.J.

Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.

Read the entire essay here.

’Marginal Whiteness

California Law Review
Volume 98, Number 5 (October 2010)
pages 1497-1594

Camille Gear Rich, Associate Professor of Law
University of Southern California

How are whites injured by minority-targeted racism? Prior to filing her Title VII interracial solidarity claim, Betty Clayton thought she knew. For years, Clayton, a white cafeteria worker employed by the White Hall School District, was granted a nonresidency privilege that allowed her to enroll her daughter in one of the district’s schools. This was a special arrangement, as neither she nor her daughter lived within the district’s boundaries. This special arrangement abruptly came to an end when one of Clayton’s black coworkers learned that she had been given the nonresidency privilege and asked the district for the same benefit. The district refused the black worker‘s request and, to rebut any claim of racial favoritism, rescinded Clayton’s right to the privilege as well. The district then reinstituted an old rule that provided that only “teachers” and certified “administrative” workers were entitled to the nonresidency benefit, thereby ensuring that both Clayton and her black co-worker were ineligible. Clayton found herself the victim of what she believed was an obvious case of explicit racial bias.

Was Clayton a victim of race discrimination? Her claim may give some readers pause. Some might conclude that she was not subject to race discrimination, arguing instead that she was merely a secondary victim that fell prey to “friendly fire”—a white casualty incidentally injured by the district’s attempt to discriminate against her black coworker. Others might share Clayton’s view, arguing that she was a victim of discrimination. But for the districts desire to discriminate against her black coworker, the district would not have reinstated the stricter benefits rule and denied Clayton the residency privilege. But for the district’s discriminatory actions, Clayton would have been able to preserve her access to a valuable economic benefit: the ability to send her daughter to a White Hall school. And Clayton’s supporters would note that there was ample evidence in her case to prove the district’s racially discriminatory motivations, including: the district’s prior discriminatory behavior; the timing of the district’s decision to return to the old residency rule; and the absence of a reasonable nondiscriminatory justification for the old rule’s reinstatement.

Clayton seemed to believe that the merits of her claim were self-evident; however, her confidence was misplaced, as her allegations raise thorny questions about how courts, antidiscrimination scholars, and indeed even laypersons see whites’ relationship to minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace. Courts called upon to review these questions, particularly in Title VII cases, spend precious little time exploring how whites perceive minority-targeted discrimination to operate, or the range of ways in which minority-targeted discrimination perpetrated by certain whites can directly harm other whites’ interests. A case in point: in Clayton, the court quickly concluded that whites can be injured by minority-targeted discrimination but then tracked Clayton’s claim into a little known area of Title VII precedent, referred to here as interracial solidarity doctrine. As Clayton soon discovered, this analytic turn was less of a boon than it initially seemed, as interracial solidarity doctrine exerts an extraordinary regulatory power over white plaintiffs who attempt to use Title VII to challenge minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace. Rather than merely sorting out strong claims from weak ones, the doctrine functions as a kind of normative litmus test used to assess whether the type of harm white plaintiffs allege as a consequence of minority-targeted discrimination counts as compensable injury. As this Article shows, the doctrine plays this powerful gatekeeping function because it is informed by certain historically specific civil rights era propositions about whites and their relationship to race and race discrimination. The Article examines the costs the doctrine’s strong normative commitments have imposed on Title VII plaintiffs and asks whether the enforcement of interracial solidarity doctrine has become an end in itself, regardless of whether it actually serves Title VII’s larger policy goals.

Specifically, Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine currently only recognizes two kinds of harm whites can suffer from minority-targeted discrimination, and therefore only permits plaintiffs to plead these two kinds of injury. The first injury a plaintiff may claim is the frustration of his associational interests. This injury is based on the civil rights era norm establishing that whites are entitled to the benefits of diversity, that is, the economic, cultural, and educational relationships they can form by associating with mino-ities. The second injury a plaintiff can raise is the violation of a plaintiff’s right to a “colorblind” or nondiscriminatory workplace. This injury is informed by the civil rights era norm that whites have an interest in striving for a colorblind society. The “colorblindness” injury is based on the understanding that racial prejudice is a moral wrong because it compromises the struggle to make the United States a race-blind meritocracy. Scholars will recognize that both the diversity and colorblindness concepts of harm appear in areas of antidiscrimination law other than the interracial solidarity cases; however, these concepts play a special role in Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine, as they are the only bases the doctrine recognizes as a source of harm…

…In summary, this Article reviews cases involving Title VII interracial solidarity claims to reveal the hold that civil rights era norms have on legal understandings about whites’ relationship to minority-targeted discrimination. My goal is to reveal the burdens these norms impose on low-status or marginal whites as they attempt to plead their Title VII claims. My hope is that the discussion of marginal whites’ interests will help reveal their potential as allies in antidiscrimination struggles. However, this potential can only be fully realized if marginal whites’ problems and challenges are better reflected in Title VII doctrine and explored in antidiscrimination scholarship. To this end, this Article also shows that the two kinds of injury courts currently recognize under interracial solidarity doctrine—the denial of the enjoyment of a colorblind workplace and the frustration of one’s interest in diversity-based associational opportunities—are second-order concerns, and consequently fail to motivate substantial numbers of white persons. Indeed, the doctrine‘s focus on second-order injuries seems even more puzzling when one considers that it almost entirely overlooks the more highly motivating first-order injuries marginal whites suffer because of minority-targeted discrimination, including basic economic and dignitary harms. A doctrine that attended to these first-order interests would be far more effective in causing whites to initiate interracial solidarity actions. Therefore, the Article uses “failed” Title VII interracial solidarity cases like Clayton to develop a more expansive and nuanced account of how whites are injured by minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace, providing an essential supplement to the existing concepts of harm in Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine.

This Article, however, is more than a descriptive account that catalogues overlooked or undervalued injuries present in interracial solidarity cases. It also uses these injuries to develop a theory of “marginal whiteness,” a framework that allows courts and scholars to consider how white racial identity dynamics can be linked to interracial conflicts in the workplace. The discussion begins by defining the class of “marginal whites”—individuals who, because they possess some nonracial, socially stigmatized identity characteristic, have more limited access to white privilege, and relatedly have a more attenuated relationship to white identity. I argue that this attenuated relationship to whiteness often causes marginal whites to chafe at other whites’ requests that they bear burdens to support the maintenance of white privilege. Put differently, marginal whites’ ambivalence about whiteness becomes a critical frame that can allow low-status whites to see how higher-status whites’ attempts to limit the options of minorities actually materially interfere with marginal whites’ immediate economic and dignitary interests. The Article posits that, if Title VII provided these marginal whites with a compelling account of their injuries, they would be more likely to bring Title VII claims. The Article then considers how the marginal whiteness framework can help improve antidiscrimination scholars’ analysis of intraracial and interracial conflicts more generally…

…Part IV anticipates concerns about the social and intellectual transmission of the marginal whiteness framework, addressing questions about its descriptive accuracy, theoretical ambitions, and its potential to disrupt or undermine contemporary antidiscrimination mobilization efforts directed at whites. Part IV explains that, rather than wholly replacing civil-rights-era-influenced normative and descriptive accounts of whites’ interests, the concept of marginal whiteness provides an essential supplement to existing accounts of harm. Part IV also more specifically considers the ways in which marginal whiteness can function as a useful analytical tool in understanding contemporary “white racial formation” projects, including the overtures being made to and the identity politics struggles associated with multiracial whites, white Latinos, and Middle Eastern whites. It explores marginal whiteness’s potential explanatory power for understanding questions of ethnic and class fractures within the category of whiteness, while acknowledging the need for additional study on these questions. Part IV concludes by highlighting the ways in which the marginal whiteness framework breaks substantially from early Critical White Studies’ accounts of white interests, demonstrating its promise as a better analytic tool for analyzing post–civil rights era whites‘ struggles regarding racial identity than existing models of their interests.

Therefore, although a person may claim a “white” identity, she is merely a putative white person and therefore may not be socially recognized as white in all contexts. The unstable nature of putative whites’ whiteness claims is more easily seen in the case of multiracial whites or whites with phenotypic characteristics that may suggest they are of mixed or prominent ethnic ancestry. What is less often acknowledged is that putative whites with phenotypic characteristics that technically mark them as white may still exhibit features, engage in behaviors, or be otherwise marked in some way that signals to other whites that they are marginal or low-status white persons. Circumstances of scarce resources—or political, cultural, or social conflicts—may trigger higher-status whites to use these features to effectively redraw the lines of whiteness in a particular context and deny marginal whites access to resources (or white privilege). These low-status or marginal whites may find that they are, for all practical purposes, being treated like minorities, as they are subject to defamatory statements and denial of privileges available to other white workers. Consequently, people who exhibit low-status identity markers, but self-identify as white may find that their anxiety levels are increased when they are exposed to new or unfamiliar communities of whites, as they fear potential rejection or unfair treatment by other whites who do not regard them to be true white persons.

Although anxieties about racial misrecognition trouble all persons invested in maintaining their racial identities, individuals seeking to claim whiteness often suffer from particularly acute anxieties, because being socially recognized can confer a raft of social and material benefits. Stated alternatively, these putative whites know that misrecognition is not merely a source of irritation, embarrassment, or inconvenience, as might be experienced by a minority not properly identified with her chosen racial group. Rather, misrecognition may impose significant material costs for self-identified whites, costs that can affect their life chances…

…Finally, whites may be attracted to the marginal whiteness framework because it responds to America‘s changing demography. The number of multiracial persons in the United States who identify as mixed-race has risen significantly. At the same time, there has been a willingness by some white communities to accept mixed-race persons as white. Additionally, Latinos and Middle Easterners encounter institutional and social pressures that encourage them in some contexts to identify as white persons. Together these changes have created a situation in which many persons socially recognized in some spaces as being white are treated as minorities in others. This split consciousness may cause these contingently recognized whites to have a distant relationship with whiteness, similar to that predicted by the marginal whiteness model. Taken together, the demographic and social changes described above present antidiscrimination scholars and courts with a critical challenge: will we construct a doctrine that responds to these whites‘ potential to develop more of a critical stance on whiteness and white privilege, or will we allow this potential to go unmined? As studies show more whites growing disengaged from discussions about race, there will be more pressure to find novel ways to encourage whites to rejoin antidiscrimination efforts…

Read the entire article here.

Check One Box: Reconsidering Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People

California Law Review
Volume 84, Number 4 (July, 1996)
pages 1233-1291

Kenneth E. Payson

Introduction

“What are you?” As the child of a Japanese mother and a White father, I have often been asked this question. While I am also male, heterosexual, law student, spouse, sibling, and child, this query is usually directed at my racial identity. As a mixed-race person, I am part of an ill-defined, amorphous group of persons who are increasingly becoming the subject of private and public scrutiny. As one commentator quipped, one “cannot turn on ‘Oprah’ without seeing a segment on multiraciality…” The simple question “What are you?” illustrates the fundamental role race plays in defining our relationships with others. When faced with ambiguous morphology, we seek clarification of another’s racial identity so that we may begin defining our…

Read the entire article here.

Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Duke University Press
2007
360 pages
37 b&w photos, 9 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4037-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4018-8

Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

Table of Contents

• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “We Declare That We Are Indians”: Dominican Identity Displays and Discourses in Travel Writing, Museums, Beauty Shops, and Bodies
• 1. “It Is Said That Haiti Is Getting Blacker and Blacker”: Traveling Narratives of Dominican Identity
• 2. “The Africans have No [Public] History”: The Museo del Hombre Dominicano and Indigenous Displays of Dominican Identity
• 3. “I Could Go the African American Route”: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C.
• 4. “They Are Taken into Account for Their Opinions”: Making Community and Displaying Identity at a Dominican Beauty Shop in New York City
• 5. “Black Women are Confusing, but the Hair Lets You Know”: Perceiving the Boundaries of Dominicanidad
• Conclusion: “Black Behind the Ears, and Up Front, Too”: Ideological Code Switching and Ambiguity in Dominican Identities
• Notes
• References
• Index

“I Was Black When It Suited Me; I Was White When It Suited Me”: Racial Identity in the Biracial Life of Marguerite Davis Stewart

Journal of American Ethnic History
Volume 26, Number 4, Women’s Voices, Ethnic Lives through Oral History (Summer, 2007)
pages 24-49

A. Glenn Crothers
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Tracy E. K’Meyer, Associate Professor of History
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Sitting onthe rooftop restaurant of the fictional Drayton Hotel in Chicago, Irene Redfield, the occasional “passer” and protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Passing, is suddenly swept with panic when she notices another woman—ostensibly a white woman—staring at her. “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” Redfield asked herself. “No,” she concludes after some time, “the woman sitting there staring couldn’t possibly know” because a light-skinned woman like herself was usually mistaken “for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.” Despite her assurance, Redfield still was troubled by the experience. She “felt, in turn ” Larsen writes, “anger, scorn, and fear slide over her.” Larsen’s fiction, based in the reality of African American life in the 1920s, provides a clear portrait of what sociologist F. James Davis has called “the agony of passing,” the fear of exposure by both the white and black communities. Fast forward to the end of the twentieth century, when in contrast to Larsen’s fearful passer Irene, such popular figures as Tiger Woods celebrate their mixed-race backgrounds and when the U.S. Census, which, as one sociologist puts it, “counts what the nation wants counted,” offers such individuals the opportunity to reject old categories and self-identify as “other.”

Marguerite Davis Stewart’s life spanned the decades between these two poles of racial experience, between tension-wrought “passing” and the embrace of multiracial identities. About the same time Larsen was envisioning the scene at the fictional Drayton Hotel, Stewart and her mother, light-skinned, African American women from Louisville, Kentucky, were staying at an all-white hotel in French Lick, Indiana. Brought to the hotel by a white man who loved Stewart’s mother, Stewart, a child at the time, remembered no sense of panic, no sense of fear in this environment. “Any time my people wanted to do what they wanted to do, they did what they damned [well] pleased,” including…

Behind the Lines—Marquerite Davis

Louisville Magazine
November 2006

Bruce M. Tyler, Associate Professor of History
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

The writer, an associate professor of history at the University of Louisville and author of Louisville in World War II (Arcadia Publishing, 2005), became intrigued by the role African-Americans played during the transformation of Bowman Field from a civilian airport to an Army Air Forces airfield after Pearl Harbor. In the course of his research, he met an elderly Marguerite Davis, who lived alone in Louisville with her memories — and photographs and documents — from her years working with members of the armed services as they evolved from segregation toward integration during those war years. Here, based on interviews with Davis and those who knew her, as well as research into the documents of the day, is the story of a woman who moved between black and white as the military geared up for World War II.

The first question I ask during an interview is, “When were you born and where?” I asked Marguerite Davis Stewart and she replied that her name was Marguerite Nelsenia Davis and she was born in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 1, 1911. She was from a mixed-race parentage — her father was African-American and her mother was from a German family in Munfordville, Ky. Her parents were Preston Davis, a black commissioned lieutenant during World War I, and Luverta Davis. The two did not stay together long because, my interviewee said, “My father and mother were incompatible.” Her father nevertheless stayed in contact and helped support mother and daughter in Louisville.

Apparently, Luverta Davis did not approve of Preston Davis’ lifestyle. Marguerite Davis said that her father smuggled Canadian whiskey in through Chicago and brought it to Louisville and sold it to the white-owned hotels during Prohibition. He did not do this work himself, according to his daughter, but paid others to do it. He had several white partners. He also had business involvements with several nightclubs that catered to blacks, although some whites patronized his clubs. Davis did not link her father’s underworld and nightclub lifestyle to the breakup of her parents, but this seems a strong possibility to me. I learned to not say or ask something that might get me tossed out of her home and end my interviews or frequent telephone conversations with her in her declining years. She made it clear to me on several occasions that she sought to have her professional life recorded for posterity, not her personal life, though she often turned our conversations to the latter.

Although Davis held strong views about race relations, she repeatedly told me that she wanted to downplay race as much as possible. She thought racial distinctions were silly and highly destructive to her and the human rights of people. Davis was light-skinned and could have passed for white, but she completely rejected any such notion. She admired her father and said nothing to disparage him. “My identity was irrelevant to me,” she said in one of our interviews. “The places I went and the work I did (in the Red Cross) were important to me. If you want to know the truth about it, I have no racial identity. I liked my black college. I enjoyed Fisk University (a historic black school located in Nashville, Tenn.).

“I liked black people; I liked some white people; I liked some Japanese; I liked some of everybody, and some I didn’t like. Race has no meaning to me and never did in my family.”…

Read the entire article here.

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Volume 28, Number 1, Identities (Spring, 1995)
pages 56-70

Sally O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of English
Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Michelle Cliff has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican writer is not called into question. Yet when she is read against the background of Caribbean literary criticism, her authorial identity moves into the foreground. In this perspective, Cliff, as author, becomes problematic as soon as we try to define what she “is” as a Caribbean writer: a very light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, a product of the Jamaican upper class (she came from a family of landowners with slave owners in their past), an expatriate (who has lived in Europe and the United States since 1975), a lesbian, a feminist, and an academic. The reception of her work indicates that Cliff herself-her embodiment as an author-has been an important factor in the evaluation and classification of her writing. As author, Cliff stands at the point of connection-or rupture-between two major non-congruent constructions of identity: third-world postcolonialist and first-world postmodern. Also relevant are debates about “race” as social construction (and its different operations in an American or a Jamaican context), and about gender and sexuality as constituent components of identity.

It is not only Cliff’s authorial embodiment, of course, that raises these questions. Her work has always been overtly concerned with questions of identity, from the 1980 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, through essays, short stories, poetry, and criticism, and three novels: the partly autobiographical Abeng (1984); No Telephone to Heaven (1987); and Free Enterprise (1993). In this essay I shall focus on No Telephone to Heaven as a site where familiar notions of identity based in race, class, gender, and sexuality are questoined; it is in critiques of this novel that we can examine how Cliff’s authorial self is implicated in evaluations of her work.

The authority of identity is a central issue for a writer who straddles first world and third world, colonizer and colonized, the postmodern and the postcolonial—the word “postcoloniai” itself being a symbol of disagreement between the two worlds. The tension arises because western post-…

A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana

Louisiana State University Press
April 2011
328 pages
6 x 9 inches, 21 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807137932

Alexander P. Tureaud, Jr.

Rachel L. Emanuel

Throughout the decades-long legal battle to end segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, attorney Alexander Pierre Tureaud was one of the most influential figures in Louisiana’s courts. A More Noble Cause presents both the powerful story of one man’s lifelong battle for racial justice and the very personal biography of a black professional and his family in the Jim Crow-era Louisiana.

During a career that spanned more than forty years, A. P. Tureaud was at times the only regularly practicing black attorney in Louisiana. From his base in New Orleans, the civil rights pioneer fought successfully to obtain equal pay for Louisiana’s black teachers, to desegregate public accommodations, schools, and buses, and for voting rights of qualified black residents.

Tureaud’s work, along with that of dozens of other African American lawyers, formed part of a larger legal battle that eventually overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation. This intimate account, based on more than twenty years of research into the attorney’s astounding legal and civil rights career as well as his community work, offers the first full-length study of Tureaud. An active organizer of civic and voting leagues, a leader in the NAACP, a national advocate of the Knights of Peter Claver—a fraternal order of black Catholics—and a respected political power broker and social force as a Democrat and member of the Autocrat Club and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Tureaud worked tirelessly within the state and for all those without equal rights.

Both an engrossing story of a key legal, political, and community figure during Jim Crow-era Louisiana and a revealing look at his personal life during a tumultuous time in American history, A More Noble Cause provides insight into Tureaud’s public struggles and personal triumphs, offering readers a candid account of a remarkable champion of racial equality.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Underestimated and Misperceived
• 2. Of Creole Heritage
• 3. Educating Alex
• 4. Southern Exodus
• 5. Preparing for a Legal Career
• 6. Return to New Orleans
• 7. Meeting Lucille
• 8. Growing Community Involvement
• 9. The War Years
• 10. NAACP Lawyer
• 11. Law and Fatherhood
• 12. “Separate but Equal” Strengthened in the Face of Desegregation
• 13. Desegregation of Primary and Secondary Schools
• 14. The Politician
• 15. Desegregation Battles after Brown
• 16. Enforcing Brown’s Mandate in New Orleans Grade Schools
• 17. Catholics and Desegregation
• 18. More to the Desegregation Mandate
• 19. Reconstructing Public Education
• 20. More Direct Action
• 21. Courts Are the Way
• 22. Race against Time
• Notes
• Index

Underestimated and Misperceived

He sat in that chair day after day, reflecting on his life as he spoke haltingly into the tape recorder. He was a man whose erect bearing had once projected calm assurance and deep human insight and whose physique had once reflected his lifetime enjoyment of the rich Creole cuisine of New Orleans.

He looked much older than his seventy-three years, and a casual visitor might have thought that his lack of movement and energy reflected a mental exhaustion as well. Despite the fact that he was now gaunt and barely had enough strength to rise from a chair without assistance, he refused to give in to the constant pain that increasing doses of medication could not relieve. As he ruminated over his life, he recalled names, dates, places, and events with unerring accuracy.

The depth of knowledge and perseverance the old man exhibited seemed implausible for one in his condition. But then his entire life had been one impossible challenge after another. Through sheer will, he had changed the face of Louisiana forever. He had helped to stifle rampant segregation through a series of historic lawsuits. He had altered attitudes and conquered adversity with a disarming but unyielding demeanor. The wizened old man in the chair did not look as if he had done any of those things. But then Alexander Pierre Tureaud had been consistently underestimated and was often misperceived by others.

Knocking on the doors of houses in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans, whose owners awaited their early morning deliveries of French bread and other baked goods, Alexander Pierre (“Alex”) Tureaud, nine years old, cheerfully greeted the customers as he delivered purchases to their doorstep. The white woman who managed the neighborhood store where he worked assumed, when hiring the curly-haired boy, that he was white.

When the owner of the store later discovered that Alex was a Negro, he instructed the manager to fire him. It did not matter that Alex did a good job, was conscientious, punctual, polite, and liked by the customers. In fact, the store manager paid him a little extra each week, called “lagniappe” by Creoles, because she was more than satisfied with his performance. Following the directive of the owner, the manager fired Alex, and the boy’s initial opportunity to earn his own money was taken away because of racial discrimination.

A wide-eyed, hopeful young Creole experienced his first painful rejection as a colored person during the early 1900s in the segregated South. The wages from the part-time job, though only $1 a week, enabled him to contribute to his family’s meager household income and allowed him to have his own spending money.

Years later, Alexander P. Tureaud greeted two white men with a collegial tip of his hat as he walked by them and entered the courthouse. “Seen that nigger lawyer, yet?” one ol the men asked. Realizing that the man was addressing him, Tureaud shook his head, chuckled to himself, and proceeded up the steps without a second glance in their direction. As he entered the building, he overheard the man’s next remark: “We’re gonna have some fun with that nigger today.” It was then that Tureaud realized that these men were his opposing counsel.

Instead of being angered by their racist comments, Tureaud was amused. Their off-the-cuff statements would create a psychological advantage when he confronted them later in court. Tlieir remarks served to fuel his enthusiasm for the legal battle ahead.

Once inside the courtroom, the two white lawyers could not conceal their surprise when Tureaud introduced himself as the attorney for the plaintiffs and smiled respectfully at the opposing counsel. Tureaud had been mistaken as white many times before, and he knew he could use it to advance his objectives…

…Born three years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared racial segregation the law of the land, Tureaud, in addition to his legal career, became a student of history. lie was particularly inquisitive about his lineage as a New Orleans Creole of color.

The desire to fight racial injustice had been set long ago in the Creole culture of Louisiana. Tureaud found within his culture role models of activism and aligned himself with men and women determined to achieve equality. Pride in his heritage taught him that it is more noble to fight injustice, no matter what, than to resign oneself to it…

Creole Is, Creole Ain’t: Diachronic and Synchronic Attitudes toward Creole Identity in Southern Louisiana

Language in Society
Volume 29, Number 2 (June, 2000)
pages 237-258

Sylvie Dubois, Gabriel Muir Professor of French Studies
Louisiana State University

Megan Melançon, Associate Professor of English
Georgia College

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

European colonization during the 17th and 18th centuries gave rise to numerous Creole societies all over the world. In the 1869 edition of the Larousse dictionary, the French term créole referred to those born in, or native to, the local populace; but the 1929 edition depicted Creole as correctly designating only a Caucasian population—further noting that, “by way of analogy, it could be used to refer to non-Caucasian peoples of current or former colonies” (Dominguez 1986:15). A recent English dictionary (American Heritage 1992) gives five definitions of the word créole which pertain to identity: (a) A person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America; (b) a person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern US, especially Louisiana; (c) a person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States; (d) a person of mixed Black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language; and (e) a Black slave born in the Americas, as opposed to one brought from Africa. In Louisiana, “the term came early to include any native, of French or Spanish descent by either parent, whose non-alliance with the slave race entitled him to social rank. Later, the term was adopted…

The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

Random House, Inc.
2011-08-16
336 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-45555-0

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency.
 
Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.
 
Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history.
 
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents