Mixed Race Studies

Not keeping up appearances? Mixed race Asian Americans and the use of racial language

University of Utah
December 2009
76 pages

Paul Charles Humbert-Fisk

A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science

There has been a movement to proclaim that mixed race (biracial or multiracial) individuals transcend race or bring about an end to race and racism. In the U.S., many people also believe that they know race when they see it and that race can easily be pointed to, defined, and labeled. This language of race (which I am calling realist racial language) frames racial and ethnic identities as homogeneous, static, and as uncontested in terms of group membership. Many texts written by and about mixed race Asian Americans challenge both of these discourses about race. In this paper, I contend that the way race is commonly talked and written about is harmful to mixed race individuals. I examined the Pacific Citizen newspaper and the books What are you? and Part Asian: 100% Hapa for how mixed race Asian Americans narrate their experiences and contest, question, and subvert common sense notions of race. For many mixed race individuals, questions about race do not go away and instead race becomes pervasive in their lives. I use Foucault’s concept of surveillance to help understand the close scrutiny placed on mixed race individuals, through actions like asking “What are you?” I draw on Trinh Minh-ha’s approach by attempting to highlight and interrupt how “Truth” and validity are discursively created about race through the rules and regulations of (academic) disciplines. I believe that if teachers and scholars continue to rearticulate realist racial language in their discussions and analyses of race, they will continue to create problematic and deficit views of mixed race individuals.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
  • Research Question
• DEBATES IN CRT ON ANALYZING ISSUES OF RACE
  • Intricacies of Race and Representation
• LIMITATIONS OF REALIST RACIAL LANGUAGE
  • Positionality
• DISCOURSES AND SURVEILLANCE OF RACE
• METHODS
• INTERPRETING MIXED RACE TEXTS
  • Defensive Interruptions
  • Questioning Interruptions
  • Productive Interruptions
• DISCUSSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR CRT/LATCRIT
• REFERENCES

Read the entire thesis here.

The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition

Wasafiri
Volume 13, Issue 27
pages 5-10
DOI 10.1080/02690059808589583

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt confided to his diary his ambition to write a book. Its object would be ‘not so much the elevation of the colored people’—the concern of most late nineteenth century reformers, both white and black—‘as the elevation of the whites,’; for he considered it was ‘the unjust spirit of caste’, rather than the moral or economic or educational conditions of blacks which lay behind racial inequities in America. Chesnutt’s focus on white Americans as the problem would be accompanied by a particular methodology. He did not propose ‘a fierce indiscriminate onslaught; not an appeal to force, … (for) the subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans …, cannot be taken by assault’. Instead, ‘their [garrison) must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it’. This metaphor, of the secret operation which carries the writer silently into the enemy’s camp, is a peculiarly apt one for Chesnutt’s writing. His first book would not be published until 1899 but the two collections of stories which came out that year, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, were both as subtle and as determined to make his point as the image suggests. In those books too, and in a subsequent novel, The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt would often appear to be taking his stand on enemy ground and revisiting fictions which were themselves part of the problem. Chesnutt not only took white authors as his models but seemed at times to seek out genres particularly associated with that ‘feeling of repulsion toward the negro’ which he believed so prevalent.

In a sense Chesnutt’s literary tactics reflected his own anomalous position in a society obsessive about racial boundaries. The son of free North Carolina blacks, Chesnutt was probably also the grandson, on both sides, of white men. His appearance was pale enough to ‘pass‘ for white, though it was an option he rejected. Physically ‘white’ to the eyes of the unacquainted, culturally ‘white’ in his education and tastes, Chesnutt was nonetheless black historically; in the place he inherited in America’s rigidly stratified society. Chesnutt’s writing addressed his country’s racial inequality and its slave-owning history but formally it continued to resemble the ‘white’ tradition of writing on the subject…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Classification and History

Routledge
1997-02-01
376 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8153-2602-1

Edited by

E. Nathaniel Gates (1955-2006)
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

Explores the concept of “race”

The term “race,” which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of “races” as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of “race” and “racial” hierarchies in law, literature, and culture.

How “racial” categories facilitate social control

The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that “racial” categorization is a powerful social force that is often used to promote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on “race” have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups.

A multidisciplinary resource

This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source.

Table of Contents

• Volume Introduction
• The Crime of Color—Paul Finkelman
• Reflections on the Comparative History and Sociology of Racism—George M. Fredrickson
• The Italian, a Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890-1898—George E. Cunningham
• Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia—C. Fasseur
• Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship—Ian Haney Lopez
• The Prerequisite Cases—Ian Haney Lopez
• Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology—Alexander Saxton
• Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality—Alexander Saxton
• Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia—Ann Stoler
• Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States—David R. Roediger
• The Race Question and Liberalism: Casuistries in American Constitutional Law—Stanford M. Lyman
• Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness—David R. Roediger
• Acknowledgments

In My Experience: A Multi-Racial Heritage

Forum: with Michael Kransy
KQED Radio
San Francisco, California
2011-12-16

Dave Iverson, Host

As part of our series “In My Experience,” spotlighting the personal stories of our listeners, we talk with a panel of biracial and multi-racial people about race, identity and what it’s like to grow up looking different from your neighbors and even your parents. We listen to their stories, and we welcome yours.

Download the episode (00:51:58) here.

Boucicault’s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

Atlantic Studies
Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009)
pages 81-95
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802696287

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault’s advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault’s play, Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault’s close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed.

Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach’s influential study of what he called the ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ made The Octoroon a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in ‘‘the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic’’, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody also drew on the play in her study of the ‘‘mulatta’’ in nineteenth-century British/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks examines it as a transatlantic ‘‘spectacle of race.’’ The play’s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written ‘‘after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry’’ (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black…

…This article examines Boucicault’s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault’s source for the play, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel The Quadroon. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault’s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault’s focus is very different from Reid’s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid’s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the ‘‘Irish dramas,’’ The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault’s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play’s exploration of the social implications of the ‘‘Octoroon’s’’ mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Negro Defined

The Yale Law Journal
Volume 20, Number 3 (January, 1911)
pages 224-225

In many of the states where a considerable portion of the population is colored, statutes define the term negro and establish his status where the same is considered, because of local conditions, as essentially different from that of Caucasians. Where legislatures have either negligently or intentionally left the terms “negro” and “colored” undefined, courts have faced difficulty in reaching exact decisions on the point of just what proportion of negro blood in a person of mixed racial descent will constitute him or her a “negro” or “colored.” The question is purely academic, and its settlement lies largely in the discretion of the court, in combining technical definitions of ethnological experts and accepted public opinion on the subject.

In the recent case of State of Louisiana v. Treadway, 52 So., 500, an exhaustive review of statutory and judicial law resulted in a divided court on the question in issue. Here the defendant, a male octoroon, was indicted, charged with having lived in concubinage with a female member of the Caucasian race. The statute governing the alleged offense made criminal, concubinage between members of the Caucasian race and members of the negro or black race.

The decision hinged on the question in issue: “Was an octoroon a member of the negro or black race?” The court decided, three to two, that the defendant, an octoroon, was not a negro within the meaning of the statute…

Read the entire article here.

The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

American Quarterly
Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer, 1956)
pages 166-170

Nils Erik Enkvist
Akademi Abo, Finland

After his great successes, and notably that of Colleen Bawn, Dion Boucicault became something of a leading figure among English-speaking playwrights, while the critics as well as the public eagerly watched his prolific pen. In the summer of 1861, everyone in London knew he was about to produce his topical play about slavery, which had been so favorably received in the United States. This was indeed a subject well cut out for his cosmopolitan powers; when, after considerable delay, The Octoroon was finally presented at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday, November 18th, 1861, it came as a shock both to the playwright and to the critics that the fifth act was hailed by the audience with many rude noises. The reasons for this were debated at some length in the London papers; they provide a significant insight into Anglo-American relations at that time.

As readers of Professor Quinn’s Representative American Plays will recall, the story of The Octoroon was based upon the fact that a white man could not marry the one-eighth-Negro slave girl he loved. In the original fifth act Zoe had poisoned herself to preserve her maiden purity from the ruffianly overseer who had bought her. It was Zoe’s suicide that finally roused the tempers of the English audience. Possibly they felt cheated, having read in their playbills how Southerners sometimes escaped the predicament of the present hero and heroine by cutting their veins and mixing their blood, which, technically, sufficed to make a colored person of a white man. This hoary stock device was not used, and the tragic impact of the octoroon…

Wealthy free women of color in Charleston, South Carolina during slavery

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2007
271 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275800
ISBN: 9780549175599

Rita Reynolds, Assistant Professor of History
Wagner College, Staten Island, New York

This dissertation focuses on the lives and experiences of a small group of affluent free mulatto women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike their enslaved sisters we know very little about their community and the place they occupied in it. To comprehend the everyday world wealthy free women of color inhabited I begin by examining the origins of the wealthy free colored community in Charleston. I then investigate individual case studies of five wealthy free mulatto and black women and how their varying choices, made under differing degrees of societal duress, molded and formed their lives. Biographical sketches of Rachel and Martha Inglis, Nancy Randall, Hagar Richardson and Margaret Bettingall consider the different options each woman experienced under the same social, economic and racial framework. All five women (whose stories are told here for the first time) dealt with enslavement from either a personal perspective as slaves themselves, or as a recent memory in recalling a mother or grandmother’s bondage. Their stories relate how the lives of wealthy free women of color were paradoxical and how they often dealt with triumph and tragedy in the same instance.

Like the majority of wealthy southern white women who spent a portion of their time as sophisticated urbanites, wealthy free women of color also set out to participate as free people in a slave society. To fully share in the economic and social benefits of society these women made deliberate efforts to improve their station through education, religious participation, social institutions and caste and racial identification with their wealthy white neighbors. However, the oppressive nature of Southern slave society greatly thwarted their best efforts. As a result, free blacks basic rights were fundamentally denied. This examination of five wealthy free women of color will analyze the manner in which social, community and family relationships influenced the world these women occupied. Racial and class status were also defining creeds for free wealthy women of color. By probing into the importance of race and class affiliations in the free mulatto community a clearer portrait of racial hierarchy among the wealthy emerges.

The making of a middlerace: the social politics surrounding Black-White interracial marriages and Black White biracial identity

Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, Illinois
May 2008
253 pages

Yoftahe K. Manna

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Communication Studies

In an attempt to uncover the social politics surrounding Black-White interracial marriages and Black-White biracial identity, this thesis investigates outsiders’ and insiders’ perspectives on the issues. Black and White participants of the study reported positive attitudes toward Black-White interracial marriage, while they reported negative attitudes toward Black-White biracial individuals. No statistically significant differences were found between Blacks and Whites in attitudes toward Black-White interracial marriages and Black-White biracial identity. No statistically significant differences were found between men and women, either. The insiders’ reports, however, contradicted these findings. Both Black-White interracial couple and Black-White biracial adult participants of this study reported that society’s (Blacks’ and Whites’) attitudes toward them were negative. Findings are discussed and ideas for future studies forwarded.

Table of Contents

• Contents page
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Foreword
• Chapter One: Review of the Literature
  • Introduction
  • BIack-White interracial marriage
  • Black-White intermarriages: Historical backgrounds
  • Interracial marriages on the rise
  • Intermarriage motivations
  • Challenges, discrimination, and stereotypes
  • Interracial marriages: Pathological?
  • Attitudes toward, and acceptance of, interracial marriages
  • Attitudes toward biracial identity
  • Black-White interracial marriages: Implications
  • Racial identity and Black-White biracial individuals
  • Implications of biracial identity
  • Role of environment and social support for biracial individuals
  • Implications of biracial identity
  • Social politics surrounding interracial marriage
  • Social politics surrounding biracial identity/Social stigma
  • Role of communication
  • Research importance
  • Symbolic interactionism and social constructionism
• Chapter Two: Attitudes toward Black-White Interracial marriage and Black-White biracial identity
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Procedure
  • Results
    • Attitudes toward Black-White interracial marriages
    • Attitudes toward Black-White biracial individuals/identity
  • Discussion
• Chapter Three: The Social Politics Surrounding Black-White Interracial Marriages
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Findings
    • “Just another marriage”
    • “We are possible because of love”
    • Family’s attitude toward Black-White interracial marriage andrelationship with the interracial couple
    • Social attitudes toward and society’s relationship with Black-White interracial families
    • “Human”
    • “We have differences but not racial ones”
    • “God-centered”
    • “No challenges, but … “
    • Advantages and disadvantages
    • Comfort zone
    • Role of communication
    • “Support matters”
    • Upbringing and environment
    • “Better covered”
    • Race talk
    • “What we mean”
  • Discussion
• Chapter Four: Middlerace: The Social Politics Surrounding Black-White Biracial Identity
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Findings
    • Racial identity
    • Challenges, advantages, and disadvantages
    • Attitudes toward Black-White interracial marriage
    • Attitudes toward Black-White biracial individuals
    • “Support matters”
    • Environment’s role
    • Middlerace
    • Role of communication
    • Race talk
    • “My box”
  • Discussion
• Chapter Five: General Discussion: The Social Politics Surrounding Black-White Interracial
  • Marriages and Black-White Biracial Identity
    • Introduction
    • Role of communication
    • Conclusion and ideas for future studies
• References
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C

Read the entire thesis here.

Carothers McCaslin’s Progeny Tracing the Theme of Redemption Chronologically Through the Multiracial McCaslins

Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
1999
Paper 211
pages 38-50

Christine Reiss
Western Kentucky University

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel that depicts the complicated family history of the McCaslins. There are primarily three branches of the family: the white, male-descended McCaslins, the white, female-descended Edmondses, and the multiracial, male-descended Beauchamps. The multiracial line of the family, the Beauchamps, are the progeny of the original McCaslin patriarch, old Carothers McCaslin. His act of miscegenation with one of his slaves produces a daughter, on whom he then fathers a son. This act of miscegenation and incest sets in motion a family line that struggles with the weight of its father’s sin. The individuals seek to live the most liberated lives that they can, given the various social constraints with which they come into contact, and by the end of the novel, they accomplish a fair measure of freedom, perhaps even redemption, from their father’s sin.

Read the entire paper here.