Mixed Race Studies

The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal

Duke University Press
November 2011
160 pages
20 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5210-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5199-3

Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University

Perhaps the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods rocketed to the top of a once whites-only sport. Endorsements made him a global brand and the world’s richest athlete. The child of a multiracial marriage, Woods and his blond, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed to represent a new postracial America. Then, in late 2009, Woods became embroiled in a sex scandal that made headlines worldwide. In this concise yet far-reaching analysis, Orin Starn brings an anthropologist’s perspective to bear on Tigergate. He explores our modern media obsession with celebrity scandals and their tawdry ritualized drama, yet he offers much more than the usual banal moralizing about the rich and famous. Starn explains how Tiger’s travails and the culture of golf reflect broader American anxieties—about race and sex, scapegoating and betrayal, and the role of the sports hero. The Passion of Tiger Woods is required reading for all those interested in the high-stakes world of professional golf, the politics of sports and celebrity, and the myths and realities surrounding the flawed yet riveting figure who remains among the most famous athletes of our time.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Golf Backward Spells “Flog”
• 2. The Tiger Woods Revolution
• 3. Tigergate, Celebrity Scandal, and the Apology Society
• 4. Internet Wars, Sex Addiction, and the Crucifixion of Tiger Woods
• 5. Postracial Fantasies, Racial Realpolitik
• 6. Tiger’s Penis
• 7. Out of the Woods?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Post-Raciality or a Re-Imagining of Whiteness: an Interview with Clarence E. Walker

Platform: Journal of Media and Communication
Volume 3, Issue 1, Media and “Race” (April 2011)
pages 26-34
ISSN: 1836-5132

Sandy Watson, University of Melbourne, Australia

Clarence Walker is recognised as one of the leading historians of American race relations, and is noted for his advocacy of critical historical analysis of race relations and discourses as a way of understanding the present. Walker has written widely on issues relating to black American history, including five books covering variously race and politics (2009), race and the national imaginary (2010); Afrocentrism and discourses of black Africanism (2001, 1999) and the history of nineteenth century black religion (1982).

Introduction

Walker’s most recent work, with Gregory Smithers, explores the emergence of discourses of post-raciality during the 2008 United States election campaign (Walker and Smithers 2009) where Walker argued that the historical superficiality of journalism exacerbates racial tensions rather than creating greater cultural understanding on racial issues (2009, p. 39). In this interview, he discusses the applicability of what he describes as reactionary discourses (that of post-raciality, colour blindness and colour neutrality) in the context of shifting media usage and tensions arising from perceived challenges to the dominant, white-centred national imaginary.

The critique of white-centred accounts of history has been central to Walker’s recent work, and was the subject of his compelling book Mongrel Nation (2010), in which he argues for the need to recognise the interracial founding of the United States. The book contextualises the controversy surrounding 1990s claims that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, had one or more children in an interracial relationship with a slave girl called Sally Heming. These accounts were refuted heatedly by segments of academia who pointed to Jefferson’s documented concern about the dangers of amalgamation as an indication of the unlikely nature of his having an interracial affair. Walker argues persuasively and with historical force that such refutations need to be contextualised as reactionary discourses within a history of white-centred historicising and imagining of the national identity in the United States…

PLATFORM: The idea that American society is post-racial gained renewed ascendancy with Barack Obama’s election as the first (self-identifying) black President of the United States. However, narratives of post-race have been circulating in the US since the Civil Rights Act (1964). Can you elaborate on the nuances between narratives such as post-raciality, colour-blindness and race neutrality as a basis for informing analysis of their presence in political and media debates over the past two years?

Clarence Walker: In my view these are all reactionary movements. They are constructed around an attempt to efface race as a site of conflict in the American past and present. To say that one is colour-blind rather than colour-conscious is to say that you see something in someone that you don’t want to see, that is their colour. It’s also to say that you think that these issues are somewhat superficial and that if we want to wish them away we can. You can see this in the whole construction of Asians as some kind of model minority here because they’re successful academically and economically, at least in some sectors of the population. You can also see it in the hysteria over immigration with the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people over recent years.

It is the case in America that most white people do not want to talk about race. They prefer to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has effaced the racial problem, and that if there is a racial problem here it is because black people are basically angry or have refused to accept this new reality in which race is no longer a problem. But if race is no longer a problem, then why are there so many young black men between the ages of 18 and 25 including Mexicans also in American prisons? They constitute approximately one and a half million of two million people in American prisons.

Yet the Obama election was very much a racial election, despite these discourses of post-raciality. It was racial in the sense that it required white people to overcome their historical animosity towards the idea of a successful black candidate. I tend to think that up until the leaking to the media of the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as Gregory Smithers and I discuss in The Preacher and The Politician, there was little attention to the fact on the part of many white Americans that Barack Obama was black. In the case of black Americans there was great suspicion of him because he was not associated with the two historically defining moments of black American history, one being of course the question of slavery and Jim Crow, the other being the Civil Rights Movement. It was only when Jeremiah Wright’s comments were leaked and it came out that Obama was associated with this Church which was part of a Christian black nationalist movement, a particular congregation that was Afro-centric and black nationalist, that attention started to be paid to the fact that Obama was black. This led to speculation about whether Obama therefore might have a subtext of black militancy that he wasn’t talking about. This was one of the signature moments in terms of race becoming part of the election debate.

The Obama presidency has if not reignited the other being the issues about race and colour then certainly shown that they haven’t gone away. In many ways the emergence of this black man as the President of the United States is comparable to the emergence of prominent Jews in France and Germany and the political and cultural life of those countries in the nineteenth century. There were elements in those societies who were opposed to Jewish civil and political equality just as there are elements in this country who feared the election of Obama or any black person as the President of the United States.

The discourse of post-racialism which emerged in relation to the 2008 campaign was itself really a product of the chattering classes, by that I mean the media commentators and academics who talked about the ‘Obama moment’ as the post-racial moment. For example, I teach a course called the History of Race in America here at the University of California and I have just finished teaching 80 undergraduates. I have talked about this subject in the way I have done for the 37 years of my career in that I don’t mince words and I am very direct about what I want to say. Many of my students find this very disturbing because their views have been shaped by the media and some of them were very resistant to the notion that this in fact was not a post-racial society because we had a black president and that because he was of mixed race nobody talked about the fact that he had a white mother. I said to my students, “How would his history have been different if his mother was black and his father white rather than the other way around?” It had never occurred to them that this would have created a different historical narrative and a different historical actor, and one whom many white people in this country would never have voted for because his cultural experience rather than being that of a white working class family would have been that of a black family…

PLATFORM: I’d like to return to a consistent theme in your work, that of the argument that a critical appraisal of historiography is vital in understanding contemporary debates and discourses on race. In Mongrel Nation you particularly emphasised the resistance of historians and others to the notion of an interracial founding of America rather than the dominant constructions of whiteness that have underpinned renderings of history in the US. This was in relation to claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children in an interracial relationship with Sally Hemings. How can this historical perspective inform our understanding of the role of discourses such as post-racialism?

CW: In the national imaginary up until recently the United States was historically imagined by historians as purely a white nation. This is changing with the work of the very distinguished historian Annette Gordon Reed and others, as well as in my work, where you see a rethinking of the American past that is more in line with what the country was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what it is like today. The resistance to this arises out of the fact that it is very hard for some people, older people in particular, to think of the United States as anything other than ‘whiteland’ or ‘whitetopia’ and the fact that they refuse to come to grips with this. You see this most clearly in their hostility to Barack Obama. His election is something that is contrary to fact. If this is a white nation then what is it doing with a “coloured” president? And if this is a white nation, then what does it mean for the future? It means that we will have an Asian president, it means that we may even have a Muslim president, we may even have a woman president, and I hope we do. It’s not just that every generation writes history according to its own desires but that there has to be a recognition in the United States that although it was the product of white colonial settlers that the country did not remain white very long…

Read the entire interview here.

Eugenics and Mongrelization [Letter and Response]

The Eugenics Review
Volume 32, Number 1 (April 1940)
pages 28-30

To the Editor, Eugenics Review

SIR, In order that the eugenics movement shall advance successfully, the eugenics organizations must dissociate their endeavours from the widespread propaganda for race amalgamation and mongrelization. There is little wisdom in breeding selectively among individuals if the results are to be nullified by indiscriminate mixing of the races. Nearly all the arguments against the existence of different races are coming from spokesmen for races that desire admixture to, and absorption by the white race, or Aryan race, using the name in the newer adapted sense. The arguments have utterly failed to change the truth that there are at least three great races-the whites, or Aryans; the Mongolians; and the Negroes. The Jews may be regarded as a sub-race that in some degree, or at least in some countries, may be absorbed by other races.

There has been vastly less race mixture in the northern hemisphere than the amalgamation exponents contend. The United States is not a nation of mixed races, as some writers allege. There has been a small admixture of American Indian and Mexican in some of the western states, and a small admixture of Jews in some of the cities. There are about twelve million Negroes, who have a small fraction of widely diffused white blood, due mainly to miscegnation on the southern plantations before the Civil War. But there is practically no Negro blood in the one hundred and ten million whites, who are almost purely of European descent and have absolutely no intention of amalgamating with the Negroes.

The white race is unquestionably uniquely beautiful and is in many respects of superior intelligence. To mix the white features with other races would destroy the white beauty for ever. The white race should maintain its purity and should further develop its characteristics…

…The mixing of races would produce mongrels lacking the distinctive qualities and values of all races. Eugenics means, not only breeding from the superior and eliminating the unfit among individuals, but also similar procedure as between the races. The white race idealizes a pure white race and further development of its characteristics. There can be no idealization of a mongrel humanity, except among races that desire admixture with whites and thus acknowledge a belief in their own inferiority. This has been the almost universal attitude of the white race, at least in the United States. The cruel persecution of the Jews in Germany caused a temporary reaction in favour of race solidarity, but with the adjustment of the Jewish problem in some manner, the real attitude of the white race will become more outspoken and unmistakable. The eugenics organizations must act along these lines, else their efforts will fail and new organizations will be formed to strive for the true eugenic ideals.

CYRUS H. ESHLEMAN
1510 Lincoln Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio, U.S.A.

[Response from the Editor]

Some of the statements in the above letter must not be allowed to pass without comment. The implication in the first sentence, that the eugenics movement associates its endeavours with “propaganda for race amalgamation and mongrelization” is, as far as this country is concerned, a travesty of the facts. We should be much surprised to learn that it is true of the eugenics movement in any country. The views of this Society, as set forth in its Statement of Aims and Objects, is  “that further knowledge of the results of such crosses is needed in order to distinguish between the effects of unfavourable hereditary and environmental influences and to frame a practical eugenic policy.” This does not mean that we do not share Mr. Eshleman’s disquietude at the “indiscriminate mixing of the races,” but we should regard it as a nice question whether that is any more undesirable than the indiscriminate mating of persons belonging to the same race.

The assumption in the second paragraph would almost certainly be rejected by most competent anthropologists to-day. The plain fact that there is no such thing as an Aryan race is in no way altered by the device of using “Aryan” in its ” newly adapted sense.” The only assemblage of human beings to which this purely linguistic term may be applied is the heterogenous body of ethnic and national groups who share the common peculiarity of speaking the Aryan or Indo-European languages. The “great white race” represents in fact a somewhat elastic conception, but however arbitrarily its limits are defined it is difficult to see how they could exclude the majority of Jews. The fact, however, that they would certainly not include the indigenous Jewish communities which exist in both Abyssinia and China is an indication of how far-to quote Huxley and Haddon—”the term Jew is valid more as a socio-religious or pseudonational description than as an ethnic term in any genetic sense.”

The claim that “there has been vastly less race mixture in the northern hemisphere” than is sometimes alleged, may be questioned in the light of some data which have been submitted to us for publication by Mr. J. C. Trevor, formerly one of the Eugenics Society’s Darwin Research Fellows and now University Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge. In Mr. Trevor’s paper, for which we hope to find room in our next issue, the ratio of mixed bloods (i.e. persons of partly European and partly non-European stock) to the total population of the United States is given as slightly over 7 per cent, Admittedly this figure can at best be only an approximation, but including as it does in its basis Kuczynski’s statement that to count 6o per cent of the negro inhabitants of that country as mulatto would be “a most conservative estimate,” it is more likely to understate the facts than overstate them. It is noteworthy that according to an eminent American scholar, the number of negroes of full blood was unduly exaggerated in the 1920 U.S. census, the last in which an attempt was made to assess the mulatto element by itself. And it need hardly be added that the familiar phenomenon of “passing for white,” with its inevitable consequences, must not be overlooked in examining the contention that “there is practically no negro blood in the one hundred and ten million whites.”…

Read the entire letter and response here.

Multiracial Identity: New Models and Frameworks for Describing and Understanding the Experience of Race and Identity

National Conference on Race & Ethnicity (NCORE) 2012
New York, New York
2012-05-29 through 2012-06-02
Date & Time To Be Determined

Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Ed.D, Consultant in Organizational Development and Social Justice Education

For two decades, research on Multiracial people has challenged, advanced, and re-framed how we view race and identity in the United States.  The impact of foundational, as well as new models of Multiracial identity is evident in the content of emerging perspectives on social identity, including Intersectionality. This highly interactive session includes a brief review of ways Multiracial identity has been framed over the past 20 years, including key issues that both support and challenge traditional theories of racial identity development.  A new model of multiracial identity that incorporates aspects of intersectionality is presented and demonstrated as a learning and programming tool.  Interactive discussion allows participants to examine questions often raised by the topic of Multiracial identity on campus, such as: to what extent is racial identity chosen as opposed to assigned? Do racial groups embody aspects of culture, and if so, what is Multiracial culture? To what extent should institutional policies and practices change to accommodate Multiracial people? and What interventions and programs have been successful in meeting the needs of Multiracial students, and what can we learn from our mistakes?

For more information, click here.

Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

University of Nebraska Press
2012-06-01
504 pages
1 illustration
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3795-7

Edited by:

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950.

Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.

Statistics On Miscegenation

Franklin Repository
1864-04-27
page 1, column 6

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The Repository details the disproportionate number of “mulattoes” in the South relative to the North.

Full Text of Article:

There were 411,613 mulatto slaves in the south in 1840, of whom 69,979 were in Virginia; 43,281 in Kentucky, and 36,900 in Georgia. These numbers are considerably beyond the legitimate proportion of those States. There were also 176,739 free mulattoes in the United States in 1860, of whom 106,770 belonged to the south, and 69,969 to the free States. Of the free mulattoes Virginia contained 23,485, which number, added to her slave mulattoes makes a total of miscegenated population of 93,824. Her mulatto slaves alone exceeded the total number of mulattoes in the free States.

The whole number of mulattoes, slave and free, in the Union, in 1860, was 588,352, of whom 69,969 belonged to the free States, and 518,383 to the slave States—a number greater than the combined white population of Arkansas, Delaware and Florida—greater than the white population of Maryland—almost twice as great as that of South Carolina, and twice as great as the combined populations of Delaware and Florida. The mulatto population of Virginia alone exceeds the number of whites in Delaware or Florida.

(No Title)

Franklin Repository
1863-12-09
page 4, Column 4

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Argues that “amalgamation” is common in the South and “very rare” in the North. A Southern correspondent concerned with the number of mixed marriages occurring wanted “amalgamation” outlawed. The Repository claims that the grooms are Southerners or foreigners because “amalgamation” is no stranger to a social system that includes slavery. In the free North, on the other hand, mixed marriages are “very rare.”

Full Text of Article:

A clerical correspondent writes us from the Southern coast protesting against the rapid tendency to amalgamation. He says that he has been called upon to perform the marriage service repeatedly where the bride was mulatto, quadroon or octoroon, and he calls upon Congress to arrest this unnatural mingling of the races, which, to use his own language, “threatens the annihilation of the white race in the United States.”

We beg our correspondent to quiet his fears on the subject. He cites some half a dozen cases to vindicate his apprehensions; but not one of them presents the union of a northern man with the southern negress. All the happy grooms were either southerners or foreigners, and they have been adopting no novel social system. Slavery has never fastened its desolation on any land without carrying the social evil of amalgamation with it; and the crime has been peculiar to the chivalric and opulent rather than to the lowly. Had our correspondent cast a thought as to the origin of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon brides of whom he speaks, he might have cherished a reasonable suspicion that amalgamation is not just dawning upon the world, but has blotted and blurred the whole social organization of the South ever since slavery came with its endless train of crime.

In the North, where the negro race is free and not the legitimate prey of a brutal master’s lust, amalgamation is very rare, and embraces only the most abandoned of both sexes; and we regard the destruction of Slavery as the only hope of dealing a death-blow to that unnatural evil. Slavery has been its parent, its shield, its apologist and stripped it of its hideous moral deformity by bringing virtuous wives and daughters and sensual sons in daily contact with it; and when its great foundation is destroyed, the whole structure of social pollution will fall with it. The remedy is not in Congress, but in the moral tone of the people, and that seems to be progressing well toward a better and brighter Nationality, free from the blistering stains of both legalized and lawless mingling of the distance races of the Continent.

A Very Sad Occurrence

Staunton Vindicator
1869-08-27
page 3, Column 2

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The paper prints an account of the killing of Jacob Scherer by John Stanley. Stanley had been co-habiting with a woman of mixed race. Scherer led a party to break up the union. They broke into the house and Stanley shot Scherer in the process. Stanley was arrested for murder. The article includes a transcript of the testimony before the grand-jury.

(Names in announcement: Jacob Scherer, John B. Scherer Sr., John Stanley, Ginnie Sorrel, Clinedinst, Anderson, Dr. B. B. Donaghe, James Gilmore, Joseph Ryan, Trayer, N. S. White, Dr. Fauntleroy, J. T. Parrent, Robert Campbell, M. G. Harman)

Full Text of Article:

Our people were startled, about midnight Saturday night last, by the announcement that Jacob Scherer, third son of Jno. B. Scherer, Sr., had been killed by Mr. John Stanley.

Jacob Scherer was a young, unmarried man, about twenty years of age, full of fun, sociable, of an amiable disposition, which caused all our people to esteem him highly, and it may well be imagined, that the announcement that he had been cut down, in the vigor of life, caused a thrill of pain in the very breast of every one.

Mr. Stanley is a man of middle age, with a wife and one child, a son, about 15 or 16 years old, and was regarded as a steady, quiet, well-meaning man.

The circumstances attending the killing are as follows:

A party of some eight or ten young men, learning that Mr. Stanley was co-habiting with a mulatto girl, named Ginnie Sorrel, blacked their faces and went to her house, on Market Street, Saturday night last, for the purpose of breaking up the illicit connexion. Several entered the house and immediately a pistol was fired, killing Jacob Scherer, almost instantly.

Mr. Stanley was identified by several of the party present, as the one who fired the shot, and was arrested, at his house, about two hours after and lodged in jail.

The examination of the case was entered into before Justices Pearce, Clinedinst and Anderson, on Tuesday morning last. We give below a synopsis of the testimony of the witnesses examined…

Read the entire article here.

The American Race

Semi-Weekly Dispatch
Franklin County, Virginia
1861-05-17
page 1, Column 3

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Reasons that America’s population has increased by one-third in the past ten years because of the intermarriage in the United States of the races of Celts, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, and North American Indians. This mixing of the races has made the “stock” more “vigorous” and will ultimately produce a peculiar “American race,” which will exhibit the different positive characteristics of all these distinct peoples.

Full Text of Article:

The present census reveals the astonishing fact that the population of the United States has increased thirty-three per cent, within the last ten years. The Roman Empire, approaching the culmination of its power, increased about thirty per cent each hundred years, but no nation in recorded times has afforded any parallel to the advancement of our own. Spain has been depopulating for a thousand years; England is not three times more populous than three centuries ago, and Italy is no more important numerically than she was in the days of Pliny; but within three quarters of a country the population of the United States has risen from three to thirty millions. It is a common error to attribute this vast increase to immigration from foreign countries; but of the twenty-three millions enumerated in ’50, not three millions were of foreign birth. Vast as the annual immigration is, it bears no proportion to the yearly increase by birth, which in itself, independent of immigration, averages thirty per cent, every ten years of the present century. This wonderful fecundity is not unexplained by physical law; it is observed that in populous countries of Europe where the same people continually intermarry, the increase is comparatively insignificant; on the same principle the aristocracy of England is observed to diminish rather than multiply, because interest and pride confine people to intermarriage to people of the same race, and often within the circle of consanguinity. But in the United States various races amalgamate; the stock becomes more vigorous, there is less of disease and early death, and the population consequently increases with a prodigious ratio… …It is computed that at least one-third of the population of the U. States are descendants of the Puritans, who were Anglo-Saxons; this strong-willed, enterprising and indomitable race, intermingling with others, has preserved ascendancy and produced a people superior in physical strength and in those attributes of mind most required in the rapid development of the great Empire of the West. Humiliating as the institution of any analogy may appear to man of the immortal mind, he must submit to the laws governing the rest of animal creation in which the union of distinct stocks produces improvement. Some of the finest examples of physical beauty have resulted from the intermarriage of Europeans and North American Indians; and, indeed, instances are not wanting where the offspring has been endowed with wonderful intellectual strength…

Read the entire article here.

The 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture & Humanities Awards: Featuring Rita Dove

Arizona Humanities Council
Tempe Mission Palms
60E. 5th Street
Tempe, Arizona 85281
2012-04-12

Free & Open to the Public

In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Arizona Humanities Council is proud to present Rita Dove as the keynote speaker for the 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture. Rita Dove will share poems from her most recent book, Sonata Mulattica, about a young mulatto violinist’s encounters with Beethoven.

Discussing the research that went into the book, she will reveal how she came to be uniquely suited to the task of rescuing the mixed race violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower from the shadows of history, and how history comes alive through art.

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. In 1996, President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal. From 1981 to 1989, Rita Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. She currently is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.

For more information, click here.