Mixed Race Studies

The Tiger Woods phenomenon: a note on biracial identity

The Social Science Journal
Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2001
Pages 333-336
DOI: 10.1016/S0362-3319(01)00118-5

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Traditional race based models exclude the unique developmental dynamics of biracial Americans such as “Tiger” Woods. Conversely, a substantial portion of the scholarly literature emphasizes social experience rather than physiological attributes as the keystone to individual identity development. In the aftermath biracial Americans are conflicted. In an effort to ensure their psychic health social scientist scholars and practitioners must inculcate a human development across the life span model to accommodate the nation’s increasing level of racial and cultural miscegenation.

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Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

University of Nebraska Press
2004
355 pages
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8321-3
hardback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3226-6

Mark Edwin Miller, Associate Professor of History
Southern Utah University

The Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) is one of the most important and contentious issues facing Native Americans today. A complicated system of criteria and procedures, the FAP is utilized by federal officials to determine whether a Native community qualifies for federal recognition by the United States government. In Forgotten Tribes, Mark Edwin Miller offers a balanced and detailed look at the origins, procedures, and assumptions governing the FAP. His work examines the FAP through the prism of four previously unrecognized tribal communities and their battles to gain indigenous rights under federal law.

Based on a wealth of interviews and original research, Forgotten Tribes features the first in-depth history and overview of the FAP and sheds light on this controversial Native identification policy involving state power over Native peoples and tribal sovereignty.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Adrift with the Indian Office: The Historical Development of Tribal Acknowledgment Policy, 1776-–1978
• 2. Building an Edifice: The BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process, 1978–-2002
• 3. Bypassing the Bureau: The Pascua Yaquis’ Quest for Legislative Tribal Recognition
• 4. Sometimes Salvation: The Death Valley Timbisha Shoshones of California and the BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process
• 5. A Matter of Visibility: The United Houma Nation’s Struggle for Tribal Acknowledgment
• 6. From Playing Indian to Playing Slots: Gaming, Tribal Recognition, and the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that the small Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut burst upon the national scene, indelibly marking popular perceptions of once unacknowledged Indian tribes in the public conscious. After struggling for centuries without federal tribal status, the Pequots under Richard “Skip” Hayward dashed with aplomb into the twenty-first century, leading the march toward self-suf ciency and self-government through their phenomenally successful Foxwoods Casino complex situated midway between New York City and Boston. Making one billion dollars annually by the end of the decade, Foxwoods was the most lucrative gambling Mecca in the United States, drawing widespread attention up and down the East Coast. A decade earlier when the tribe had secured federal acknowledgment through an act of Congress in 1983, the development had raised few eyebrows, however, causing more relief than alarm because it settled a lengthy and bitter land dispute between the Pequots and neighboring property owners. Some observers undoubtedly felt that the obscure tribe, once widely believed to be extinct, had finally gotten its revenge for past injustices. Other locals simply were happy to have a place to gamble so close to their homes, cheering the Pequots for making this possible and perhaps being a little amused by the whole unlikely scenario. Questions soon arose, however, when the group possessing Indian, European, and African ancestry grew increasingly rich and powerful, with its gambling enterprise shattering the once bucolic Connecticut countryside with crowds, traffic jams, and high-rise development. Angered by their suddenly powerful neighbor, many locals began to ask: Who were these people that variously appeared white, Indian, black, or something in-between? If they looked and lived much like their well-to-do neighbors, was the group really an Indian tribe at all? Clearly, tribal acknowledgment had given the Pequots all the bene ts of tribal status and sovereignty. But it had not allowed them to exist in obscurity as before. Every year during the 1990s tensions and recriminations grew. When a book emerged claiming that the Pequots may have tricked the federal government into believing they were an Indian tribe, local leaders clamored to have their status overturned. By 2000 the continuing deluge of press coverage ensured that the Mashantucket Pequots became the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States.

At the same time, in stark contrast to the glitz and wealth of the Pequots stood a struggling band of Shoshones in California. A world away from Connecticut in the desert sands of Death Valley National Park, the Timbisha Shoshone Indians also existed without federal acknowledgment until the early 1980s. The Shoshones were unlike the Pequots at first glance, however, and few non-Indians doubted that the tiny Timbisha group was Indian. In the late 1970s the Shoshones were struggling against the National Park Service’s efforts to evict them from their ancestral homeland, clinging to their crumbling adobe casitas and modest trailers that shifting sand dunes threatened to swallow at any moment. Decades earlier the Park Service had corralled them into a single village to make room for its luxury hotels, golf course, and RV resort to cater to tourists hoping to escape the northern winters or recapture the “Wild West” for a weekend. Like the Pequots, the Timbisha Shoshones also secured acknowledgment in 1983, but this new status provided few of the fringe benefits afforded the Connecticut tribe. In 2000 the band still lacked a federal reservation and lived in poor housing much like it had before recognition. The Timbisha Shoshones presented another face of once unacknowledged Indian peoples in the modern United States. The experience of the over two hundred other unacknowledged groups likely lies somewhere in between.

Issues

This work is about the process of acknowledging Indian tribes, whether accomplished through the administrative channels of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or through Congress.  At its core it is about modern Indian identity: how the state identifies and legitimizes tribes and how recognized tribes, non-Indian scholars, and the American public perceive Indians. Along the way it provides a rare glimpse into Indian and non-Indian representations of “Indianness” and tribalism. These pages also present the histories of four unacknowledged tribal groups viewed through the prism of their efforts to gain federal recognition. Federal tribal acknowledgment or recognition is one of the most significant developments in Indian policy in the post–World War II era, yet is also one of the most acrimonious methods of sorting out and defining Indianness in the United States. As the list of over two hundred groups seeking to secure federal tribal status grows each year, federal acknowledgment policy has become increasingly controversial and contested terrain for determining Indian authenticity.

Tribal recognition is contentious precisely because it involves definitions of what constitutes an Indian tribe,who can lay claim to being an Indian, and what factors should be paramount in the process of identifying Indian tribes. Akin to the recognition of foreign governments, federal tribal acknowledgment is highly valued because it establishes a “government-to-government” relationship between the federal government and an Indian group. Federal status thus allows a newly recognized federal tribe the power to exercise sovereignty and participate in federal Indian programs emanating from the BIA and the Indian Health Service. It also affects issues as diverse as Indian self-government, health care, Native American cultural repatriation, Indian gaming, and public lands held by the National Park Service and other federal agencies. Beyond these facts the acknowledgment process can determine the life or death of struggling groups while providing unacknowledged tribes outside validation of their racial and cultural identity as Indians…

…From the start local whites questioned whether these groups were indeed tribes and expressed doubts about their Indian identity. To the eastern landowners, most of these groups “looked” variously white, black, Indian, or something in between. They clearly did not fit the image of the horseriding, buffalo-hunting Indians they had seen in Hollywood westerns. In court the town attorneys proceeded to impugn the cultural and tribal integrity of these people, claiming that the groups had long ago abandoned their tribal organizations and assimilated into American society and culture. Despite the Wampanoags’ assertions that the land on Martha’s Vineyard was sacred to their people and that they maintained a vibrant tribal organization, town lawyers echoed a popular belief that the Wampanoags——if they were a group at all——were assimilated individuals hoping to get rich off land claims. Because the rights asserted were group rights, the hopes of the Martha’s Vineyard Indians and others ultimately rested on whether they were still an Indian “tribal” entity…

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Origin, Development and Maintenance of a Louisiana Mixed-Blood Community: The Ethnohistory of the Freejacks of the First Ward Settlement

Ethnohistory
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring, 1979)
pages 177-192

Darrell A. Posey
Georgia State University

The Fifth Ward Settlement is composed of approximately 2,500 mixed-blood (Black, While and Indian) inhabitants called “Freejacks.” The Settlement has developed as a result of various social, racial and legal distinctions that have altered the nature of the Settlement over its 150 year history. The origins and early development of the community are rooted in racial oppression, geographical isolation and cultural diversity. Today most of the restrictive racial barriers are removed, yet the Freejacks themselves seek to maintain boundaries to delineate the Settlement and preserve a distinctive identity.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of a single mixed-blood community, the Fifth Ward Settlement, to examine the changing social and political forces that have moulded the modem ethnically distinct group. The myth that mixed-blood groups are homogenous in origin is refuted and sub-group leadership patterns within the community are traced to historical heterogeneity. The community is seen as one delineated and characterized by established racial models, yet existent today as the result of various self-maintenance strategies to establish ethnic boundaries and preserve an idealized cultural and historical tradition.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is a mixed-blood community composed of approximately 2,500 individuals known in the area as “Freejacks,” who are said to be a racial mixture of Black, White, and Indian. The name “Freejack” is derogatory because of its connotations of racial mixture and is abhorred by residents of the Settlement. Freejacks claim to be White and vehemently deny racial mixture.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is located in Louisiana near the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain (Fig. 1). The Settlement is bounded to the west and east by two White communities known as Germantown and Whiteville; it is bordered to the north by swamp and to the south by timberland. Two Black communities are found within the limits of the Settlement, one on the eastern…

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The Negro Problem: Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View by M. S. Evans; The Mulatto in the United States, Including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races throughout the World by E. B. Reuter Review by: Ellsworth Huntington

Geographical Review
Volume 11, Number 2 (April, 1921)
pages 311-313

Ellsworth Huntington, Professor of Geography
Yale University

The Negro Problem

M. S. EVANS. Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View. xii and 299 pp.; map, bibliogr., index. Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York, 1915. $2.25. 9 x 6 inches.

E. B. REUTER. The Mulatto in the United States, including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races throughout the World. 417 pp.; indexes. Richard G. Badger, Boston, 1918. $2.50. 8 x 5 inches.

Many people have written on the problem of the negro, but it is doubtful whether anyone has written with a truer balance than Mr. Evans. His “Black and White in South-East Africa” is the standard book on the problem in Africa, and the present book on the United States is equally good. According to Mr. Evans, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line.” His method of solving it is first that the white man should really know the negro…

…In the Geographical Review for October last there appeared a review of Houghton’s book on the Metis or French-Indian half-breeds. The gist of the book was that the “Indians” who have distinguished themselves have been almost wholly half-breeds. By far the best results have come from intermarriages of scions of the French nobility with the daughters of chiefs. In other words heredity is of dominant importance. It is most interesting to find that in Mr. Reuter’s book on the mulatto in the United States the general conclusion is the same. The method, however, is so much more exact than in any previous study of this subject that the book may almost be considered the final word.

The first part of Mr. Reuter’s book is a straightforward account of the races of mixed blood in all parts of the world and at all times. This is interesting and valuable for reference but contains little that is new. Then follows a discussion of types of mulattoes or mixed races and of their position as the key to the race problem. This leads to the main problem of racial intermixture in the United States. First an attempt is made to estimate the actual number of the mixed types who stand between whites and negroes. For the country as a whole about a fifth of all those classed as negroes are mulattoes, but this proportion varies, being least in the South and greatest in the North and West where negroes are least numerous. The first half of the book ends with a good account of the growth of the mulatto class in the United States, the types of intermixture at various periods and in various regions, and the social status of the mulattoes. Reuter believes that a large part of the mulattoes are the descendants of white men of a decidedly inferior type and on the whole the colored women of the baser sort. Exceptions, however, are very numerous.

The second half of Reuter’s book is an accurate and painstaking statistical study of the leaders among the negroes, using the word to include every one who has even a trace of negro blood. From every available source the author procured lists of prominent colored people. Then by means of photographs or descriptions he classified these according to the color of the skin, texture of the hair, regularity of the features, etc. Those who plainly show Caucasian characteristics are counted as mulattoes, the rest as full-blooded negroes. So far as this classification errs, it is on the side of putting too many into the full-blooded group…

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Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

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Amalgamations, New and Old: The Stratification of America’s Mixed Black/White Population

University of California, Berkeley
2004
184 pages

Aaron Olaf Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology and Demography

This research focuses explicitly on the life chances of biracial black/whites. I contrast the “new” biracials, those born to interracial couples in the post Civil Rights era, to the “old” biracials, the lighter-skinned descendants of the original mulatto elite. Both groups have occupied privileged positions relative to monoracial blacks within educational and occupational institutions. For the old biracials, this privilege derives both from the inherited advantages of the mulatto elite and from the independent signi cance of skin tone within the black community.

I show that the skin tone privileges of lighter-skinned blacks declined for cohorts coming of age during and after the Civil Rights era. This decline marked the end of a system of stratification that characterized the black population for over a century. Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the new biracial advantage over monoracial blacks in educational outcomes is not the result of a skin tone hierarchy within the black population.

These new biracials differ from the old in that they have access to intimate white relatives within their family networks. On the one hand, the new biracial advantage could potentially result from race-based resources, such as access to the cultural and physical resources of their white parent. On the other hand, the new biracial advantage may result from class-based resources, primarily the selection of highly-educated parents into interracial unions.

I show that the new biracial advantage over monoracial blacks in educational outcomes can be largely explained by their relatively privileged family backgrounds. These advantages, and not biraciality itself, result in higher grades and lower grade retention, although they do not explain differences in standardized test scores. Thus, in order to understand the new biracial advantage, we must understand the dynamics of union formation in the immediately prior generation.

I show that this this pattern of interracial union formation can be most accurately described as one of lower-class black isolation. While traditional models of interracial union formation are all plausibly supported by the data, the most accurate model focuses on the exclusion of blacks with a high school degree or less from interracial unions, regardless of their potential partner’s education. This results holds in both marital and non-marital unions and points to the possibility of greater isolation for lower class blacks as interracial unions increase and to a generational bifurcation of the black class structure directly tied to issues of racial identity.

Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Table
• 1 Understanding Race in America, Understanding Race Mixing in America
  • 1.1 The Race Concep
  • 1.2 New and Old
  • 1.3 The Life Chances of Mixed Race Individuals
    • 1.3.1 The mulatto vanguard or the black elite?
    • 1.3.2 Eve and the new biracials
  • 1.4 Outline of this study
• 2 The Demise of the Mulatto Legacy
  • 2.1 The Skin Tone Legacy
  • 2.2 Colorism
  • 2.3 The Rise and Fall of the Skin Tone Hierarchy
    • 2.3.1 Trends across cohorts
    • 2.3.2 Formal multivariate models
  • 2.4 The Unremarked Demise
• 3 The New Biracials
  • 3.1 The K-12 Racial Hierarchy
    • 3.1.1 The Biracial Advantage
    • 3.1.2 Understanding the Racial Hierarchy
  • 3.2 Understanding the Biracial Advantage over Blacks
    • 3.2.1 Data
    • 3.2.2 Measures
    • 3.2.3 Models
    • 3.2.4 Analysis
  • 3.3 The Uncertain Position
• 4 Back a Generation
  • 4.1 The Selectivity of Interracial Unions
    • 4.1.1 Theories of Interracial Marriage
    • 4.1.2 Interracial Unions outside of Marriage
  • 4.2 Models
  • 4.3 Data
  • 4.4 Understanding Black Selectivity
    • 4.4.1 Interracial Marriage
    • 4.4.2 Interracial Cohabitation
  • 4.5 The Unnoticed Isolation
• 5 Tommorrow
  • 5.1 The Story So Far
  • 5.2 Possibilities
  • 5.3 Directions
  • 5.4 A Final Note
• A Supplemental Tables
• B Genealogical Data
• C Sensitivity Analysis
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• 1.1 Stylistic depiction of interracial sexual contact across United States history
• 1.2 Race and skin tone strati cation
• 2.1 Skin tone differences relative to light-skinned blacks in years of education across birth cohorts, National Survey of Black Americans
• 2.2 Skin tone differences in occupational attainment (Duncan SEI) relative to light-skinned blacks across birth cohorts, National Survey of Black Americans
• 2.3 Skin tone differences relative to light-skinned blacks in spousal years of education across marital cohorts, National Survey of Black Americans
• 2.4 BIC’ statistic for educational attainment threshold models based on year of threshold
• 2.5 Predicted effect of skin tone on educational attainment (highest grade completed) across birth cohorts, based on fourth-degree polynomial models
• 2.6 BIC’ statistic for occupational attainment threshold models based on year of threshold
• 2.7 Predicted effect of skin tone on occupational attainment (Duncan SEI scores) across birth cohorts, based on fourth-degree polynomial models
• 2.8 BIC’ statistic for spousal attainment threshold models based on year of threshold
• 2.9 Predicted effect of skin tone on spousal years of education across marriage cohorts, based on fourth-degree polynomial models
• 3.1 Logit effect of race on probability of having ever been held back across nested models, Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1995
• 3.2 Logit effect of race on probability of having ever been held back across nested models, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
• 3.3 Effect of race on grades in 8th grade across nested models, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
• 3.4 Effect of race on CAT-ASVAB scores across nested models, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
• 4.1 Spousal educational distributions by race, race of spouse, and sex, Census 1990
• 4.2 Stylized depiction of racial intermarriage patterns
• 4.3 Parameterizations for models of interracial educational partnering
• 4.4 Parameters from models of interracial educational partnering for married and cohabiting unions
• 5.1 Possible scenarios for the future, based on two dimensions of change
• B.1 Strength of interracial sexual contact in Herskovits sample, based on different assumptions
• C.1 Comparison of parameters from log-linear models with different age groups
• C.2 Comparison of parameters from log-linear models with marriages of various durations

List of Tables

• 2.1 Sample size and years for waves of the National Survey of Black Americans and the General Social Survey, 1982
• 2.2 Fit of threshold models and year of best- tting threshold compared to models without cohort change
• 2.3 Threshold models predicting educational attainment (total number of grades completed)
• 2.4 Polynomial models predicting occupational prestige (Duncan SEI Score)
• 3.1 Cross-classi cation of biological parents’ race in two surveys
• 3.2 Outcome measures by race
• 3.3 Variables by race, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
• 3.4 Variables by race, Panel Study of Income Dynamics
• 3.5 The relative position of biracials
• 3.6 Structure of the nested models
• 3.7 Race effects, gross and net
• 4.1 Union type distribution of new parents by race of parents
• 4.2 Proportion of black partners in each union type who have more than a high school education by sex and race of partner
• 4.3 Sample size of data sets
• 4.4 Fit of different interracial union formation models to marriages from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses
• 4.5 Important parameters from log-linear models, 1980
• 4.6 Important parameters from log-linear models, 1990
• 4.7 Important parameters from log-linear models, 2000
• 4.8 Comparison of isolation model to an alternative educational propensity model
• 4.9 Comparison between gender symmetry and BM/WF only models
• 4.10 Fit of models comparing interracial union formation between marital and cohabiting unions
• A.1 Polynomial models predicting educational attainment (years of schooling)
• A.2 Polynomial models predicting spouse’s years of schooling
• A.3 Models predicting whether respondent has ever been held back, Panel Study of Income Dynamics
• A.4 Models predicting whether the respondent has ever been held back, NLSY97
• A.5 Models predicting grades in 8th grade, NLSY97
• A.6 Models predicting CAT-ASVAB test scores, NLSY97
• A.7 Proportion of black partners in each union type who have a college degree by sex and race of partner
• A.8 Proportion of black partners in each union type who have more a high school diploma by sex and race of partner
• B.1 Possible Genealogies in the Herskovits Sample

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The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition

University Press of Colorado
2000
136 pages
8.2 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
Paper ISBN:978-0-87081-576-8

Virgilio Elizondo, Professor of Pastoral and Hispanic Theology; Fellow, Institute for Latino Studies and Kellogg Institute
Notre Dame University

Twelve years after it was first published, The Future is Mestizo is now updated and revised with a new foreword, introduction, and epilogue. This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.

Contents
Contents

• Foreword by Sandra Cisneros
• Preface The Great Border
• Introduction The Future Is Mestizo: We Are the Shades by David Carrasco
• 1. A Family of Migrants
  • My City
  • My Family
  • My Neighborhood and Parish
• 2. Who Am I?
  • Moving into a “Foreign Land”
    vAcceptance, Belonging, and Affirmation
  • Experiences of Non-Being
  • Neither/Nor but Something New
• 3. A Violated People
  • The Masks of Suffering
  • The Eruption
  • The Eruption Continues
  • Going to the Roots
• 4. Marginality
  • Festive Breakthrough
  • Institutional Barriers
  • Invisible Mechanisms
• 5. My People Resurrect at Tepeyac
  • The Dawn of a New Day
  • From Death to New Life
  • First “Evange!ium” of the Americas
  • Beginning of the New Race
• 6. Galilee of Mestizos
  • Is Human Liberation Possible?
  • Conquest or Birth
  • The Unimagined Liberation
  • From Margination to Unity
• 7. Toward Universal Mestizaje
  • From Unsuspected Limitations to Unsuspected Richness
  • A New Being: Universal and Local
  • Continued Migrations
  • Threshold of a New Humanity
  • The Ultimate Mestizaje
• Epilogue: A Reflection Twelve Years Later
  • The Negative
  • The Challenge

Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

Zygon Center for Religion and Science
Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
2011-03-25
13 pages

Kevin Patrick Considine
Loyola University, Chicago

My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

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Daniel Sharfstein, “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White” Penguin, 2011

New Books in African American Studies
Discussions with Scholars of African Americans about their New Books
2011-11-01

Vershawn Young, Associate Professor of English
University of Kentucky

Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal analysis (Sharfstein is a legal scholar), part ethnographic study, it is a wholly gripping and exquisitely written narrative that tracks the racial passing of three black families over several centuries, leading us right up to their living “white” descendents today. You will certainly learn a lot about the history of race in the United States from The Invisible Line and, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down.

Download the interview here. (00:57:52.)

Escape into Whiteness

The New York Review of Books
2011-11-24

Brent Staples

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Tickets to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial were a hot item in the spring of 1922. Tens of thousands of people converged on the Mall for a day of celebration that included parades, music, and speeches by President Warren Harding and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, under whose presidency the memorial had been initiated.

One of the better-known black Washingtonians on hand that sunny Memorial Day was Whitefield McKinlay, former collector of customs at Georgetown and real estate manager to many of the city’s light-skinned mulatto elite. Nearing his seventieth birthday, McKinlay had lived through the best and the worst of what the post–Civil War world had to offer people of color. He had enrolled in the University of South Carolina during the heady days of Reconstruction and then been expelled when the Democrats rose to power there and created a particularly virulent form of the Jim Crow state. He had seen black politicians swept into office by newly enfranchised black voters and swept out again when the franchise was revoked.

Through this same process, Washington, D.C., had been transformed from what one of McKinlay’s more prominent real estate clients had termed “The Colored Man’s Paradise”—a place of considerable freedom and opportunity—into what the historian David Levering Lewis aptly describes as a “purgatory,” where Negroes were barred from hotels and restaurants, driven from federal jobs, and generally persecuted by Southerners in Congress who seemed intent on erasing the colored presence from the city. Though he does not deal at length with McKinlay, Daniel Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt, brings this part of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Negro society vividly to life in his authoritative and elegantly written The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White…

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