Mixed Race Studies

A New Branch of the United States’ Miscegenated Family Tree: Lynn Nottage’s “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark”

The Feminist Wire
2011-04-29

Soyica Colbert, Assistant Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s new play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark opened at the Second Stage Theatre on April 6, 2011 to guffaws and robust applause. The play puts a playful twist on what Daphne Brooks calls “America’s miscegenated history” in order to recuperate the story of a forgotten black actress. Fittingly a comedy, Nottage’s play calls to mind the ongoing melodrama that is race relations in the United States. From the saga that Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings has become to the ongoing and offensive questions regarding President Barack Obama’s citizenship, the popular conversation about race seems to leap in the blink of an eye from the postracial world of the twenty-first century as Hortense Spillers describes in her provocative piece “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Too” to the scientific racism of the nineteenth century epitomized in a racist email Tea Party activist Marilyn Davenport sent to her constituency, picturing Obama’s parents as chimpanzees.

Using the temporal confusion race triggers in the twenty-first century to her dramaturgical advantage, Nottage’s play, directed by Jo Bonney, shuttles the viewer seamlessly through different time periods in the twentieth century, from 1933 to 1973 to 2003. The play offers an uproarious insight into the life of Vera Stark (Sanaa Lathan), an African American woman striving to become a Hollywood actress while working as the maid of a famous purportedly white actress Gloria Mitchell (Stephanie J. Block). By the end of a play that focuses on how the choices we make determine who we will become, we learn that Gloria is Vera’s cousin and that Gloria is passing for white. Laugh out loud funny, innovative in its staging and powerful in its organization, Nottage’s new play, playfully reveals the way that U.S. racial mixtries— a term used in Langston Hughes’ Broadway play Mulatto (1935) that communicates mixtures that are mysteries—create lines of contentious affiliation among women…

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“You Can’t Put People In One Category Without Any Shades of Gray:” A Study of Native American, Black, Asian, Latino/a and White Multiracial Identity

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia
May 2011
180 pages

Melissa Faye Burgess

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science In Sociology

This study seeks to explore variations in the development of racial identities for multiracial Virginians in the 21st century by focusing on the roles that physical appearance, group associations and social networks, family and region play in the process. Simultaneously, this study seeks to explore the presence of autonomy in the racial identity development process. Using Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory as the framework, I argue that a racial project termed biracialism, defined as the increase in the levels of autonomy in self identification, holds the potential to contribute to transformations in racial understandings in U.S. society by opposing imposed racial categorization. Through the process of conducting and analyzing semistructured interviews with mixed-race Virginia Tech students I conclude that variations do exist in the identities they develop and that the process of identity development is significantly affected by the factors of physical appearance, group associations and social networks, family and region. Furthermore, I find that while some individuals display racial autonomy, others find themselves negotiating between their self-images and society’s perceptions or do not display it at all. In addition to these conclusions, the issues of acknowledging racism, the prevalence of whiteness, assimilation and socialization also emerged as contributors to the identity development process for the multiracial population.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 Problem Statement
• Chapter 2 Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 3 Literature Review
  • 3.1 The Formation of a U.S. Racial Hierarchy and Its Effects
  • 3.1.1 A Brief History of U.S. Racial Classifications: Creating the Racial Hierarchy and Increasing the Multiracial Presence in U.S. Society
  • 3.1.2 Attempts to Maintain White Superiority Through Anti-Miscegenation Laws
  • 3.2. Racial Passing
  • 3.3 The Multiracial Population Prior to the 20th Century
  • 3.4 Census Classification in the 20th Century
  • 3.5 Scientific Racism
  • 3.6 Importance of Virginia
  • 3.7 Recognizing the Possibility of Multiple Identities within the Multiracial Population
  • 3.8 Biracial Identity Development Models
  • 3.9 Factors Affecting Identity Development
  • 3.10 The Multiracial Movement
  • 3.11 A Post-Racial Society?
  • 3.12 Author’s Commentary on Issues at Play
• Chapter 4 Research Questions
• Chapter 5 Methods and Data
  • 5.1 Interviews and Recruitment
  • 5.2 Participants and their Characteristics
  • 5.3 Limitations
  • 5.4 Coding
• Chapter 6 Results
  • 6.1 Racial Self-Identifications
  • 6.2 Physical Appearance
  • 6.3 Group Associations and Social Networks
  • 6.4 Family
  • 6.5 Region
  • 6.6 Autonomy
• Chapter 7 Discussion and Conclusion
  • 7.1 Suggestions for Future Research
• Appendix A Interview Guide
• Appendix B Recruitment Ad for Collegiate Times
• Appendix C Recruitment Flyer
• Appendix D Consent Form
• Appendix E Characteristics of Interview Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Are We Content to Let Our DNA Define Us?

Diaspora@chinaSMACK
2011-07-12

Ashton J. Liu

A Chinese friend once responded harshly when asked, “Are you Japanese?” by a young child who had approached him on the street. His response struck me as strange. After all, my identity was always a topic of discussion. As a child of a Chinese-American father and Caucasian mother, I looked neither. I have thick dark hair, a long nose, large eyes, and slightly colored skin. In fact, I was more often mistaken for Hispanic or Native American rather than Asian or white. My identity was discussed among close friends, acquaintances, and even with strangers who I bumped into in a bar or with whom I had a brief encounter on the street.

Plus, I got it all the time. Meeting someone for the first time usually meant that he or she might give me that slightly elongated, curious gaze, which was followed by an awkward “I’m sorry..I can’t tell, are you [insert misconceived identity here]?” Or, in contrast, when meeting someone Asian, my appearance wouldn’t merit a second glance, but my last name would always surprise them. “Wait…. why do you have a Chinese last name?” they might ask. In time, I got used to it, like a high school graduate who puts up with questions like “What are you going to major in? What do you want to do when you graduate from college?” You know people are good intentioned and genuinely curious, but when you answer the same question to all your relatives, family friends, teachers and random acquaintances, you still answer out of courtesy, but each time you draw a deeper sigh as you prepare your now well-practiced response…

…This all changed once I set foot in college; there was a blossoming of expression and awareness. Suddenly, we were one. Organizations and clubs formed to challenge preexisting notions of race, and ran discussions, published magazines and held conferences on the multiracial experience. Being biracial went from being a footnote to being something one could flaunt, something fashionable.

Yet strangely, I grew tired of this discussion. I went to one diversity awareness event, and visited the multicultural session, structured as a reenactment of what mixed blood students encountered in high school. I entered a mock cafeteria and students representing the black table, Asian table and white table, and turned you away, saying you weren’t black, Asian or white enough to sit with them. C’mon, I thought, of course some people think like that, but what an over-dramatization….

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“Suddenly and Shockingly Black”: The Atavistic Child in Turn-into-the-Twentieth-Century American Fiction

African American Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (Spring, 2007)
pages 51-66

J. Michael Duvall, Associate Professor of English
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are signs of black ancestry. These writers thus follow the common understanding of racial interbreeding as tending toward, in Stephen Jay Gould’s parlance, “a ‘blending’ or smooth mixture and dilution of traits” (24). The “natural grandson of a Southern lady, in whose family his mother had been a slave,” Harper writes, “the blood of a proud aristocratic ancestry was flowing through his veins, and generations of blood admixture had effaced all traces of his negro lineage” (239). The blending, mixing, and dilution of African features of interracial characters occur across a wide swath of late 19th-century American fiction and answer to a wide variety of purposes, from the reconciliationist fiction of Lydia Maria Child, whose Romance of the Republic (1867) offers a model of national reconstruction in two generations of loving, moral, interracial couples who have white-skinned children, to the white supremacist tales of Thomas Dixon, whose The Clansman (1905) reifies the myth of the lascivious and tempting nature of black women via their whitened interracial offspring. And, of course, this blending model also creates the conditions for a staple trope of much white and African American fiction of the late nineteenth century and onward: racial passing.

 Yet if the fiction of the time features this “amalgamation” model of heredity as embodied by Latimer (as well as Iola and her brother Harry), it also sees the emergence of a countervailing discourse of interracial heredity the specific effect of which throws a wrench into the mechanics of passing. In Iola Leroy, the eponymous heroine warns the white Dr. Gresham, her first suitor, that should they marry and procreate, her race could be revealed by an “unmistakeab[ly]” black child (117). An undeniable “throw-back” to a black racial past, such a child would result from the supposed process of “atavism” (in Latin, “a great grandfather’s grandfather”). Submerged racial features were believed to skip generations only to recur farther down the family line, rupturing a smooth hereditary narrative of blending and exposing the parent’s “true” race, always black and never white. In many novels and stories, atavism remains only a threat. However, in texts we examine below, atavistic children are actually born. These children range in appearance from simply showing signs of color to manifesting a monstrous, ape-like form, the fancied evidence of a supposed profound and irremediable racial pollution.

We argue specifically that the actual birth of grotesquely atavistic children in fiction, suddenly appearing at the turn of the twentieth century, is both historically bound and distinctly gendered: such children were usually the product of black male/white female sexual relationships that were seen by many whites as particularly threatening to white hegemonies at the historical moment. Various turn-of-the-20th-century authors use racial atavism, structured through a logic of contamination, to consolidate racial identity, maintain the color line, or bolster white supremacist discourse. The unidirectional logic of racial contamination, common throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, fueled white racist propaganda for maintaining distinct racial categories and white hegemonies: black blood, once introduced into a family line, could be diluted, but never removed. Such mongrelization, white supremacists feared, would eventually lead to the disintegration of the white family and, consequently, the white nation. Framing these atavistic children or the threat of their appearance against their more common cousins, the light or white-skinned mulatto figure, we thus argue that they function as a dire warning both to black men of any shade and to white women whose wombs white men needed “uncontaminated” to (re)produce a white nation.

The idea of an apparently other-raced child, Werner Sollors tells us in an indispensable chapter of Neither White Nor Black Yet Both (1997), goes back to antiquity, during which an other-raced child was thought to prove adultery or, alternatively, to figure as a true wonder. In this ancient cultural setting, atavism could result in either a black or white child: such a child might be Natus AEthiopus, a black child birthed by white-appearing parents, or Natus Albus, a white child birthed by seemingly black parents. With one parodic exception, we find no instances of Natus Albus in the fiction of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. (1) Furthermore, according to Sollors, with the advent of a species model of race, the nineteenth century marks a change in attitude toward the idea of Natus AEthiopus, which he summarizes in his chapter’s closing discussion of Robert Lee Durham’s novel, The Call of the South (1900):

In the hands of a racialist radical, the Natus AEthiopus changed into the white horror of horrors. Underneath the Gothic machinery, however, one … recognizes the issues of the past in their transformation: atavism explains a child’s color, but in a cultural context in which it could be asserted that black and white must never be related in a family structure. Wonder is replaced with horror … ; adultery seems to have completely disappeared [as an explanation for atavism]; “essential” racial difference cuts even fully legalized family relations…. (66)

 The present essay builds on Sollors’s work by investigating what, aside from the species-inflected racial science and thinking that he identifies, lies behind this shift from wonder to horror, at the end of the nineteenth century. What, more precisely, governs the appearance in American novels of not just unexpected, dark-skinned babies, but grotesquely atavistic ones, and to what ends?…

…That the myth of atavism emerges in a wide range of novels makes sense, given the period’s fixation on the discourses of blood, the idea of racial purity, and the legally entrenched system of segregation, yet the texts that actually produce atavistic children are in fact striking for their rarity. Indeed, the arguably overwhelming presence of light- or white-skinned mixed-race children in interracial fiction, even in those that include the threat of atavism, prompts us to ask what governs the appearance of those few mixed-race infants who actually show black racial traits. We suggest that these children often materialize within particular narrative constructions. Two turn-of-the-century stories, both again involving racial passing and featuring comparatively mild incidents of atavism, suggest that narrative’s contours. In one, Kate Chopin’s widely-read 1893 short story “Desiree’s Baby,” a presumably white woman commits suicide and infanticide, and in the other, Pauline Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon” (1900), a mixed-race woman survives, but her male child dies. (10) In Chopin’s story, Desiree, herself a woman of “obscure origin,” marries Armand, the son of a respected family, only to produce a baby—a son—who has black racial characteristics. Unclear as to what this appearance could possibly mean, she queries her husband, who replies: “it means that you are not white” (176, 179). Befuddled by this revelation since her complexion is lighter in shade than her husband’s, but accepting his judgment against her, Desiree walks into the swamp with her infant, presumably committing infanticide and suicide. The story ends not here, however, but with Armand’s discovery of a letter written to his father from his long-deceased mother, explaining that Armand has black heritage. This discovery reverses the common narrative construct of the white male/black female coupling. Instead, the story offers us a black male/white female pairing that actually produces in very mild form an atavistic (male) child. (11) Pauline E. Hopkins’s short story “Talma Gordon” (1900) also offers a case of a mildly atavistic child. Although the child issues from the more common white male/black female pairing, the child, who has physical characteristics that identify him as having African heritage, is again male. The child dies from disease while still an infant, while his two older, physically white sisters survive. What we begin to see in these two stories of mild atavism is a gender dynamic that further complicates narrative embodiments of grotesquely atavistic children…

…The manner in which individual authors have engaged the trope of the atavistic child—as evidence of an everlasting barrier between the races, as warning not to transgress or pass over the color line, as strategy for solidifying race categories and white hegemonies–suggests that the trope of the atavistic child functions as the bearer of certain kinds of what Jane Tompkins has called cultural work the functional relation of a piece of literature to its immediate historical conditions and the answer to the question “what kind of work is this novel trying to do?” (38). Throughout the nineteenth century, novels that explored “the race question” did significant cultural work by helping to shape our national politics. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the best-known example of the impact that a novel can have in our cultural imaginary. By the turn of the twentieth century, the novel had perhaps an even greater impact on the public. As Lee Baker explains, “The mass media played an integral role in shoring up the ideological demarcation of the color line. Technological advances and rising literacy rates increased the circulation and decreased the prices of magazines, newspapers, and books. By 1905, stereotypes that had previously been reinforced by folklore or expensive texts were now voraciously consumed by the public in the mass media” (38). The graphic racist novels by whites in the first decade of the twentieth century promulgated negative stereotypes about African Americans, using the atavistic child as a nodal point for articulating the discourses of miscegenation, white supremacy, racial passing, black male/white female sex, the mythic black beast rapist, and lynching. These novels, in essence, reinforced anti-miscegenation sentiment in a particularly unidirectional way to maintain the color line and to deny black civil rights. While white male/black female sex may have been considered immoral–by many people, black and white–it ultimately failed to destabilize cultural hegemonies. Not so with black male/white female sex, which whites considered much more dangerous because it disrupted the reproduction of whiteness. White men, so novels such as Lee’s and Davenport’s conclude, must strenuously guard the white womb against race pollution and perversion, corruptions marked by the birth of a degenerate atavistic child. Punishing black men who dare pollute those wombs works to consolidate whiteness across a North-South regional divide…

….Ironically, women posed one of the greatest dangers to the sanctity of the color line because of their central role in the reproduction of whiteness. White women held the biological key to maintaining and increasing the white race, and thus fortifying white hegemonies because only white women could produce white children. Their race loyalty alone made possible the continuation of white male authority that insured white privilege. If white women’s bodies served as the vessels for reproducing whiteness, they had to remain “pure” from the corrupting taint of blackness. The grotesquely atavistic child that drove its mother to insanity and/or death became a graphic symbol of the punishment of racialized transgression and one that starkly highlights white men’s anxiety over controlling the reproductive powers of white women. Thus, while woman’s importance in cultural production was elevated above other cultural factors, it also remained linked to their racial identity and to their biological role as mother and the age-old attempt to govern female sexuality. The grotesquely atavistic child’s appearance at this moment stems from the same white fear that fueled the industry of lynching in this decade…

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Mediating Blackness: Afro Puerto Rican Women and Popular Culture

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2011-06-14
145 pages

Maritza Quiñones-Rivera

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In my dissertation I discuss how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Inés (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences. In this dissertation I argue that black women are challenging these images as sites for mediating blackness, femaleness, and Puerto Ricanness where hegemony and resistance are dialectical. I integrate a text-based analysis of media images with an audience ethnographic study to fully explore these processes of racial and gender representation. Ultimately, my project is to detail the ways in which Black women respond to folklorized representations and mediate their Blackness by adopting the cultural identity of Trigueñidad in order to establish a respectful place for themselves within the Puerto Rican national identity. The contributions from the participants of my audience ethnography, as well as my own experiences as a Trigueña woman, demonstrate how Black women are contesting local representations and practices that have folklorized their bodies. The women who form part of this study also responded to the pressures of a nation whose official stance is that race and racism do not exist. In addition, I present global and local forces—and in particular commercial media—as means for creating contemporary Black identities that speak to a global economy. By placing media images in dialogue with the lived experiences of Black-Puerto Rican women, my research addresses the multiple ways in which Black identities are (re)constituted vis-à-vis these forces.

CHAPTER 1 “MISSING IN ACTION” RACE, GENDER AND PUERTO RICAN COMMERCIALIZ MEDIA RESEARCH LANDSCAPE

Media and popular culture are powerful venues in which women assert and communicate national and social identities.1 In this light, I contend that Black Puerto Rican women mediate their Blackness by challenging folklorized representations of themselves that are perpetuated in local commercial media and advertising. In the face of a society whose media presents “race” as part of the nation’s past, a fokloric identity, many women adopt a new language of Trigueñidad in order to find a place for themselves within the national landscape. Before I begin this line of research, it is vital to first review representations of race and gender in commercial television and other media in the island…

…Theoretical Framework

Overall, the process of mediating blackness in Puerto Rico is one caught in the dual tensions between the local media‘s inscriptions of black women as folklorized on the one hand, and the influences of U.S. popular culture and additional transnational media on the other. What is crucial here is the understanding that media messages and their representations do not work in a vacuum but form part of a broader social and cultural network, and that media itself is not a monolithic body that operates as a single, unified, controlling entity. Instead, media compose a complex set of production and consumption practices. In the case of Puerto Rico from 2003 to 2006, for instance, the influence of localized media began to dwindle following their purchase by American media conglomerates. A vast majority of television programming now comes from off-shore corporations (for example, telenovelas produced in Latin America) and U.S.-based, Spanish language commercial media. In spite of this narrowing of diversity, it is important to compare Black women‘s representation in one media to racial and gender representations in another. Approaching media from this standpoint allows me to critically combine elements of existing theories in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between various media, Puerto Rican cultural identity, and black identity at the collective and individual levels. More specifically, my work is centrally interested in advertising and the way black women are represented in the Citibank advertisement mentioned above. It will be crucial not to examine advertising in insolation, however, but to also explore the representations of black women in different mass media forms, such as newspapers, television, radio, and Internet. The images of advertisements operate in a system of sign that can never work in isolation from other signs or cultural factors.

Mediating blackness is also a process that necessarily interacts with the commonly-held beliefs and daily practices of racially mixed populations in Puerto Rico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. My dissertation thus explores the production, representation, and consumption of media by populations, and incorporates academic arguments on the shifting roles and boundaries of media in daily life. My central discussion of media accordingly draws upon several fields of academic inquiry, among them media studies, black feminism, body politics, and the study of racial blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, though it is ultimately grounded in cultural studies approaches to media studies.

Among these common conceptions that must be addressed is the dominant notion of Puerto Rico as a culturally unified nation that has produced a racially mixed, democratic society. Representations of this unified Puerto Rican culture are presented in such institutions as museums, the government, the education system and other “official” cultural sites. In response to this collective Puerto Rican cultural identity, forming a racial identity is often a struggle for some non-white Puerto Ricans (See: my autoethnography in Chapter 3), especially when Puerto Rican blackness is represented as folklorized, and when racism is a tacit component of official culture (Warren-Colón, 2003, p.664). Scholars have given only minimal attention to this phenomenon, and to the dismissive or stereotypical treatment of black women‘s bodies through their folklorized representations in popular culture and other media…

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Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

Union Institute and University
June 2005
277 pages
AAT 3196614
Publication Number: AAT 3196614
ISBN: 9780542425899

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and Sciences a Concentration in African American – Native American Relations at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio

W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement, ‘The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,’ invokes images of the century’s racial antagonisms between Blacks and whites. However, racial antagonism in Virginia also occurred between African Americans and Amerindians, as the question regarding who was an Indian and who was a Negro became paramount to Amerindian survival. Central to this problem was the enforcement of a law the Virginia General Assembly passed on March 20, 1924, entitled ‘An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.’ This legislation, the first such law to be passed in the United States, was the culmination of Virginia’s three hundred year campaign to insure the ‘purity’ of the white race. Racial purity, in early twentieth-century Virginia, was defined by the absence of African ancestry. Therefore, one could be of Indian-white admixture and remain racially pure. But an Indian-Black admixture, even one drop of black ‘blood,’ and one was transformed from pure to impure, and in jeopardy of being ethnically reclassified. By denying the historical relationship between African and Indian peoples in the Commonwealth, this paradox informed the state recognition process and helped many to successfully maintain their aboriginal status. However, the problem of the color line continues in the twenty-first century because racial integrity remains the dividing factor in African-Indian relations. The following discourse examines the changing state of African-Indian relations in Virginia from the Colonial period to the present. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the United States racial formation project in relation to Africans and Indians; chapter 2 examines Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories concerning African-Indian admixture, racial identity, and their influence on Virginia’s twentieth-century racial purity campaign; chapter 3 examines the historical relationship between African and Indians by tracing the Indian presence in the slave and free ‘colored’ populations of colonial and antebellum Virginia; chapter 4 examines the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, its impact on African-Indian relations, and the debate it provoked among such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; chapter 5 provides a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropological advocates Frank Speck and Helen Rountree, their activism on behalf of the Virginia Tribes, and the ways their advocacy contributed to the racial integrity cause; chapter 6 is a case study which examines Central Point, Virginia, the home of Richard and Mildred Loving (Loving v Virginia), to interrogate race and self identity, namely the self identity of Mildred Loving as an Indian woman; the Epilogue examines the contemporary activism of Virginia residents of mixed African-Indian heritage whose alternative historical consciousness defies racial politics and promotes decolonization, reclamation and empowerment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapters
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia Revisited
  • 3. The Changing State of African and Indian Relations in Virginia
  • 4. Towards State [Un] Recognition: Native Identity and the One Drop
  • 5. The Present State of Virginia Indians: The Predicament of Of Race and Culture
  • 6. “Tell The Court I Love My [Indian] Wife:” Interrogating Race and Self Identity in Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue – Coming Together: Decolonization and Empowerment, Reclaiming Ourselves
• Appendices
  • A. An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
  • B. Loving Marriage license
  • C. Weyanoke Holiday Card
  • Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

George Washington University
2009-01-31
392 pages

Laura Janet Feller

A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people.

In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan-Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract of Dissertation
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s
• Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State
• Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies
• Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples
• Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Introduction

The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.

Matthew Frye Jacobson

One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, recreated, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.”

Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.”

The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance oftheir Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations?

For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that they have dealt with whites in whose eyes Indians were often both racialized and ethnicized. For tidewater organized Native groups in the period of this study, it seems that their foes wanted them categorized primarily as “racial” groups, and that Virginia Indians fought back on grounds and with weapons that to a large extent reflected the racialized, segregated world in which they lived.

The 1924 law on “racial integrity” was part of a long history of racial legislation in Virginia and throughout the United States designed to create racialized lines in a world where such lines had been blurred since the age of European colonization began. “Miscegenation” law, for example, was solidly entrenched in the English colonies then in the United States, until the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The first ban on “interracial” marriage in the English North American colonies was Maryland’s in 1664. Virginia’s first “miscegenation” law dated from 1691, and it explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals. Before 1924, Virginia laws specified what made someone black rather than defining whiteness. To define “blackness” as a legal matter, Virginia law before 1924 typically expressed and codified racialized identities in terms of numbers of ancestors, or fractions of ancestry. Virginia’s 1924 “racial integrity” law, though, defined legal “whiteness” rather than “blackness.” In doing so, this statute in effect made a matter of explicit law, for the first time in Virginia, the concept of a “one drop rule” for what makes someone legally African American. The sole exception to the whiteness definition in the 1924 law was that a Virginian could be legally white if he or she had no more than “one-sixteenth” Indian “blood” and his or her ancestors were otherwise “white.”

This 1924 statute stands at several intersections in the history of racialist thinking and racism in America. In it, Jim Crow meets “scientific racism” and eugenic thought. As a “miscegenation” law, the statute also illustrates some of the ways in which racialized identities are entwined with conflicts about sexuality. It evidences how constructions of social and cultural identities could connect with, or be contested by, state powers and legal discourses, within the context of the modernizing tendencies of post-World War I governmental policies and programs…

…Starting with 1924 as a focal point, this project looks at Native and “mixed” Native identities as claimed and recorded before and after passage of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity” law. Moving backward into the post-Civil War era and then forward from 1924 into the 1950s, this study explores the impact of Virginia’s 1924 “miscegenation” law on individuals and communities who claimed Native American identities. The 1924 law was a climax of sorts in decades of official and social efforts by whites to classify Virginia Indians variously as “persons of color,” “mulattoes,” or African Americans. Native peoples’ reservation lands in Virginia disappeared, except for two that survive to this day. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey people of those two reservations had some advantages in that they had and have a land base, and along with that land they also have community structures recognized by whites. Even the reservation peoples, though, faced white reluctance to concede the continuing existence of red, rather than black or white, identities in Virginia. Non-reservation tidewater Native people had even trickier choices to make about when and how they would identify themselves publicly, in official situations and documents, as Indians…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race and Making America in Brazil: How Brazilian Return Migrants Negotiate Race in the US and Brazil

University of Michigan
2011
314 pages

Tiffany Denise Joseph

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology) in The University of Michigan

This dissertation explores how US immigration influenced the racial conceptions of Brazilian returnees, individuals who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil. Since Brazil was once regarded as a multi-racial utopia and represents a very distinct social environment when compared to the US, the dissertation objective was to learn how returnees adapted to the US racial system and if they “brought back” US racial ideals to Brazil upon returning. I conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews with 49 Brazilian returnees in Governador Valadares, Brazil, the country‘s largest immigrant-sending city to the US to explore how these individuals perceived and navigated racial classification and relations in Brazil and the US before, during, and after the US migration. To more effectively isolate the influence of immigration for returnees, I also interviewed a comparison group of 24 non-migrants.

Findings suggest that returnees relied on a transnational racial optic to navigate the US racial system as immigrants and to readapt to the Brazilian racial system after returning to Brazil. I use the term “transnational racial optic” to demonstrate how migration transformed returnees‘ observations, interpretations, and understandings of race in Brazil and the US. Returnees felt the US racial system was characterized by more rigid racial classification, overt forms of racism, and pervasive interracial social and residential segregation compared to Brazil. The US migration also influenced returnees‘ perceptions of racial stratification in both societies, particularly with regard to the socio-economic positions and behaviors of US and Brazilian blacks.

After the US migration, most returnees were not conscious of how their racial classifications or perceptions changed, although the results indicate shifts in their racial and skin tone classifications over the course of the migration. Furthermore, returnees felt that they did not remit US racial ideals to Brazil after returning. While both returnees and non-migrants thought racism existed in Brazil, returnees, after having lived in the US, were more cognizant of the structural manifestations of racism than non-migrants. This suggests that returnees‘ observations of race in the US influenced their perceptions of race in Brazil post-migration, which is indicative of the transnational racial optic.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Background and Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 3 Methodology
• Chapter 4 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Personal Conceptions about Race in the United States
• Chapter 5 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Societal Conceptions about Race in the US
• Chapter 6 The Return: Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Post-Migration Conceptions of Racial Classification in Brazil
• Chapter 7 Contemporary Life in GV: Conceptions of Race among Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
• Chapter 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: Returnees‘ Race in Brazil Pre-Migration (Brazil Census)
• Figure 2: Returnees‘ Race in US (US Census)
• Figure 3: Returnees‘ Average Skin Tone Classifications during Migration Process
• Figure 4: Non-Migrants‘ Racial Classifications (Brazil Census)
• Figure 5: Returnees’ Racial Classifications at Time of Interview
• Figure 6: Coding Schema for Returnees’ and Non-Migrants’ Brazilian Racial Conceptions
• Figure 7: Coding Schema of Returnees‘ US Racial Conceptions

List of Tables

• Table 1: Demographics of Return and Non-Migrants
• Table 2: Immigration Demographics for Return Migrants
• Table 3: Topics in Interview Protocols
• Table 4: How Participants Racially Classified Interviewer
• Table 5: Importance of Race before Immigrating
• Table 6: Importance of Race in US
• Table 7: Importance of Race before Immigrating vs US
• Table 8: Brazilian Racial Classifications
• Table 9: Open-Ended Racial Classifications in US
• Table 10: Self-Ascribed vs. External Racial Classification in US
• Table 11: Factors Influencing Open-Ended Racial Classification
• Table 12: Experiences of Discrimination by Racial Classification
• Table 13: Defining Race- Return Migrants vs Non-Migrants
• Table 14: Factors Influencing Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
• Table 15: Returnees’ Skin Tone Classifications at Each Retrospective Migration Stage
• Table 16: Racial Classification in the US vs Racial Classification
• Table 17: Pre-Migration Racial Classification vs Racial Classification
• Table 18: Self-Ascribed Racial Classification-Return Migrants vs. Non-Migrants
• Table 19: Importance of Classifications
• Table 20: Return Migrants‘ Skin Tone Classifications across Racial Categories
• Table 21: Returnees’ Perceptions of Racial Democracy
• Table 22: Manifestations of Racism
• Table 23: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 1-24)
• Table 24: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 25-49)
• Table 25: Non-Migrants‘ Demographic Info

List of Appendices

• Appendix 1 Demographic Information
• Appendix 2 Coding Schema
• Appendix 3 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-English Version
• Appendix 4 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants-English Version
• Appendix 5 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-Portuguese Version
• Appendix 6 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants- Portuguese Version

Chapter 1: Introduction

I filled it out [Census form]. Yes, they asked [for my racial classification] and I put white because I wasn‘t Hispanic or Latino. [The form] had Hispanic, white, black, there wasn‘t an option for me specifically. Even though in Brazil, I considered myself white, there [in the US] for them [the Americans] I am not white because white there is blue eyes and blonde hair.

–Renata, white woman, 46 years, New York

Because when they [Americans] look at you, they know, they know that you‘re not American. (quirks) I don‘t know how they know, but…if you speak English [with a foreign-sounding accent] like in America, they know you are not American. I don‘t know why.

-Amanda, white woman, 33 years, Massachusetts

Increasing immigration to the United States in the last fifty years has had a significant impact on the population’s racial and ethnic diversity. Although the US historically has been predominantly white and black, the 2000 US Census revealed a population that has become increasingly racially nonwhite since the majority of recent immigrants have come from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.2 While these immigrants bring with them hopes for a brighter future, they also come with conceptions of race from their countries of origin, which are not easily shed and may influence their perceptions of and incorporation into US society. In the US, race is a primary mode of social organization and the social construction of race has created widespread social inequality between whites and people of color since the nation’s inception (Feagin 2000; Omi and Winant 1994). Feagin (2000) argues that the black-white racial binary is the foundation of US race relations and is the ruler by which other racial and immigrant groups are measured. Therefore, immigrants who come to the US enter a racially polarized social context.

The quotes at the beginning of this chapter provide recollections of how Brazilian return migrants, or Brazilians who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil, negotiated race while living in the US as immigrants.3 The ideas captured in Renata and Amanda’s quotes suggest a reconfiguration in the US of self-ascribed racial classification that differed from their racial self-classifications in Brazil, as well as recognition of how “Americans” identify foreign others.

While race is a strong structuring factor for US residents, race and racial classification in immigrants’ countries of origin may be very different from those in the US, which means immigrants must learn how to negotiate race in their new context. According to Landale and Oropesa (2002):

“Not only must migrants adapt to change in their status from majority group member to minority group member; they also face pressure to redefine themselves in terms of the black-white dichotomy that delineates race relations in the U.S.” (pg. 234).

Such a process of redefinition may be challenging for immigrants who never before have classified themselves using rigid racial terms, particularly for those who come from Latin America, which has a history of more socially-accepted racial mixing that has resulted in populations with a diverse range of physical racial markers, such as skin tone and hair texture (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Roth 2006; Duany 2002; Itzigsohn et. al 2005). Brazil, once considered a racial utopia compared to the US because of its perceived harmonic interracial relations, is such a country. Whereas one’s ancestry and physical features are generally the basis for classification into a single specific racial group in the US, such characteristics may signify different racial classifications in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Renata’s quote clearly demonstrates how her physical features are considered white in Brazil although she is considered nonwhite in the US. Thus, Renata and other Latin American immigrants come to the US with a different understanding of race and must adjust to existing racial classifications and race relations upon arrival. As Latinos are currently the largest ethno-racial minority in the US and do not easily fit into the historical black-white racial binary, it is important to explore how immigrants from Latin American countries, more specifically Brazil, adapt to race in the US.

Brazil is the Latin American country of interest in this study for three reasons. First, there have been various comparative studies of race in the United States and Brazil that have explored the unique racial characteristics of these countries (Degler 1986; Marx 1998; Telles 2004; Bailey 2009). Brazil and the US are two of the largest countries in the Americas and share a history of European colonization, Indigenous conquest, and African enslavement. Yet, the social construction of race has unfolded very differently in each context, motivating studies that explored how the racist US differed from Brazil’s multi-racial paradise.4 Second, as the largest slave-holding societies in the Americas, Brazil and the US have large African-descended populations. The majority of African slaves imported to the Americas were sent to Brazil. Even after the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African slaves were still illegally imported to Brazil, which was last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. Thus, Brazil’s African-descended population is significantly larger than its US counterpart (Telles 2004). In fact, it has been argued that Brazil has the world’s second largest-African descended population after Africa (Telles 2004; Martes 2007). Finally, this research is also motivated by the increase in Brazilian immigration to the US in the last thirty years. Brazil’s economic recession in the 1980s with its high unemployment and inflation rates encouraged significant emigration for employment purposes to the US, Canada, and Japan (Goza 1999; Margolis 1994; Takenaka 2000). Since that time, Brazilians have migrated to the US in large numbers, yet there had been very little research examining their experiences until the mid-1990s.

Given the plethora of comparative race research on Brazil and the US and the growth of Brazilian immigrant communities in the US, a study exploring how Brazilian immigrants come to understand race in the US is warranted. The primary goal of this dissertation is to comparatively explore the social constructions of race in Brazil and the US through the observations, perceptions, and experiences of individuals who have lived in each country for an extended period of time. While other comparative studies have relied on survey and historical data to understand how race and racism “work” on a macro-level in each society, I examine how individuals make sense of and negotiate race in both countries at the personal level. Because Brazilian immigrants are one of the most recent immigrant groups to the US and extensive return migration has been documented among this group, Brazilian return migrants are the ideal group for such a study. As individuals who were racially socialized in Brazil, they entered the US with a different perception of race and encountered a racial system that relied on more rigidly defined racial categories and groups and appeared to be more overtly racist than Brazil.

Furthermore, upon leaving the US, Brazilian return migrants go home with a different mindset that has been shaped by their experiences abroad. Migration between both countries facilitates comparisons between migrants’ quality of life in Brazil and the US that make it difficult to readapt to life in post-migration Brazil (Margolis 2001). Margolis (2001) argues that “some returnees become people in-between [who] are not entirely satisfied with life in either country” (pg. 243). Thus, if their mindsets are “changed” by living in the US, it is possible that US migration also facilitates a change in these individuals’ racial conceptions in Brazil after the US migration. I define racial conceptions as a set of ideas that help individuals understand how social actors, in this study Brazilian returnees, negotiate race in a particular context. In this study, I operationalize these conceptions in three ways using data from respondents’ experiences of: (1) racial classification, (2) observations, perceptions, and experiences of racism or racial discrimination, and (3) an understanding of how race functions on a societal level. For example, Brazilian return migrants in this study negotiated racial conceptions in the US through: (1) their personal, professional, and miscellaneous interactions with other Brazilians, other immigrants, and native born US citizens, and (2) their “consumption” of US culture through television, music, and newspapers.

This dissertation examines how exposure to racial systems in the United States and Brazil influences the racial conceptions of Brazilian return migrants in three contexts: (1) in Brazil before the US migration; (2) in the US as immigrants; and (3) in Brazil after the US migration. To comparatively explore race in the US and Brazil via Brazilian return migrants’ racial conceptions, I address two major questions in this study:

(1) How does immigration to the US change racial conceptions for Brazilian return migrants while they are living in the US and after returning to Brazil?

(2) Do return migrants “bring back” racial ideals from the US and if so, what impact does extensive US migration have on racial relations in returnees’communities?

To address these research questions, I rely on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 49 Brazilian return migrants and 24 non-migrants (Brazilians who never migrated) in Governador Valadares, Brazil, a city of 250,000 residents in the South Central state of Minas Gerais. Governador Valadares (GV) has historically been Brazil’s largest immigrant-sending city to the US. Emigration to the US has so heavily influenced the local economy that the city has been famously nicknamed by Brazilians as “Governador Valadolares,” as in US dollars. About 15 percent of GV residents, also known as Valadarenses, are estimated to be living in the US and nearly 80 percent of Valadarenses have at least one relative residing in the US (CIAAT 2007; Margolis 1998). Additionally, return migration to GV after the US migration has been heavily documented (Marcus 2009; Assis and de Campos 2009; Martes 2008; Siqueira 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). The prevalence of US migration has created a constant flow of people, money, and culture between GV and the US, so much so that GV and particular US cities with large numbers of migrants from GV are considered transnational social fields or:

“… set[s] of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed… [that] connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1009).

Because the majority of migrants from GV intend to return to their native city after the US migration, they maintain social and economic ties while living in the US. Valadarenses generally immigrate to the US to work for two to five years to earn and save as much money as possible for the purpose of purchasing a home and car or starting a business upon returning from the US. This process has been referred to as “Fazer à América,” which translates in English to “making America” (Martes 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). These migrants hope the US migration will facilitate upward social mobility and access to what they perceive to be a better or more “American” quality of life in GV after migration…

…Additionally, the exploration of racial conceptions for this subset of individuals who are on the move between the US and Brazil also helps me develop a more nuanced argument about race as a social construction that varies from place to place. This is particularly true for the comparison of the US and Brazil, two countries with very distinct racial histories that are now experiencing shifts in racial discourses due to changing ethnic demographics (US) and the introduction of affirmative action policies (Brazil). The increase in rates of interracial marriage, introduction of an option to classify in more than one racial category on the US census, the dismantling of race-based affirmative action policies in the US and the recent election of Barack Obama as the first black (biracial) president of the United States have spurred debates about whether the US has now become a postracial society. Furthermore, the growth of the Latino population into the country’s largest ethno-racial minority and increased immigration from Latin America have had a significant impact on US demographics.

At the same time, to address racial inequality in Brazil, some universities and companies have begun to implement racial quotas to increase the representation of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil’s higher education system, which has been very controversial. Although nonwhites constitute nearly half of the Brazilian population, whites constitute about 73 percent of university students (Telles 2004; Stubrin 2005; Bailey 2009). Due to the prevalence of racial mixing in Brazil and many white Brazilians’ acknowledgment of having black racial ancestry, the implementation of affirmative action has made it necessary to racially classify individuals (blacks) in a socially meaningful way to determine who can benefit from race-specific policies. This policy has facilitated discussions about an importation of US racial classification standards (Telles 2004; Araujo 2001; Fry and Maggie 2004; Maio and Santos 2005; Bailey 2009). Because both Brazil and the US are experiencing shifts in racial discourse as they relate to discussions of racial demographics, racial classification, and inequality, some researchers have argued that the US will undergo either a (1) “Latin-Americanization” of race in which existing racial boundaries will become more ambiguous or (2) shift from the traditional black-white racial binary to a black-nonblack binary in which existing racial boundaries will be realigned (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Skidmore 2003; Lee and Bean 2004; Yancey 2003). Other researchers suggest that the US and Brazilian racial classification systems are on “converging paths,” as each country’s racial dynamics seem to be resembling its counterpart (Daniel 2006; Bailey 2009):

It appears to be the case that racial dynamics in the United States and in Brazil are like two ships passing in the night, one showing signs of movement toward mixed-race framings and the other toward single-race identification (Bailey 2009, 8).

Thus, it is possible that just as Brazilians are moving back and forth across US and Brazilian borders, that racial ideals in each country are also being exchanged, which highlights the significance of this study in another way. If race in the US is becoming “Latin-Americanized,” it is important to understand how Latin Americans (in this study Brazilians) conceive of race in their countries of origin and in the US if researchers are to understand how the social construction of race in the US may evolve in the future…

Read the entire dissertation here.

FBI investigating racist threat in Polk County

Chattanooga Times Free Press
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Sunday, 2011-06-26

Beth Burger

Ducktown, Tenn.—More than a week after part of a cinderblock was thrown through a trailer window with a threatening racist message attached, an interracial Polk County couple continue to have sleepless nights.

“I just want to get out of there,” said Ellis Weatherspoon, 45, who lives in Turtletown with his common-law wife, Jennifer, and their 3-year-old son. Weatherspoon, who is black, and Jennifer, 28, who is white, have been together for seven years.

While the Polk County Sheriff’s Office categorized the crime as a simple vandalism case with no apparent motive, the Chattanooga FBI office now is investigating the incident, according to Sheriff Bill Davis.

And things have gotten worse for the couple. On Thursday, the couple found their 6-month-old pit bull/German shepherd mix, Gilbert, dead at the trailer, a rope tied around its neck several times and its body propped against its doghouse…

…Ugly past

Historically, there were consequences for having an interracial relationship in Tennessee.

Dating back to the 1800s, Tennessee law forbade whites from cohabitating or marrying people who were more than one-eighth black, said Daniel Sharfstein, an associate law professor at Vanderbilt University.

A violation was a felony and people could do time in prison, he said. But sometimes mobs took the law into their own hands and lynched the illicit lovers.

Despite the law, interracial relationships were accepted in some rural mountain areas throughout the South, said Sharfstein, who is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

“The struggles of everyday life were often more important than something as meaningless as race,” he said. “So when I read about the Weatherspoons, to go out of your way to attack an interracial couple — it’s not just disgraceful, it also goes against a most cherished tradition of life in the mountains where people lived the life they chose to live, free of outside meddling and interference.”…

Read the entire article here.

Fifteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering

Melungeon Heritage Association
Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry Communities
Warren Wilson College
Swannanoa, North Carolina
2011-07-14 through 2011-07-16

MHA is delighted to announce that this year our annual Union will be celebrated at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, July 14-16, 2011. This will be our first Union in the Carolinas, states of primary significance to the history of mixed ancestry communities across America. Melungeon roots in the Carolinas have been prominent topics of discussion in past Unions, and MHA welcomes the opportunity to celebrate and study our heritage on this historic and beautiful campus. Warren Wilson College is located a few miles from Asheville in a scenic area near the highest mountains in the East. It has historic connections to the Melungeon community of Vardy, which the Union will celebrate.

We will have speakers on a wide variety of genealogical and historical topics. The program is still being developed, but two distinguished authors have agreed to discuss their new books at the Union. Each book breaks new ground in the literature of mixed ancestry in the United States.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011) tells three stories that will be especially meaningful to MHA readers. Author Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Within a month of publication, his new book was acclaimed in the New York Times as “astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights.” This study of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families has the potential to change the national conversation about race, and MHA is honored by Mr. Sharfstein’s participation in 15th Union.

Lisa Alther is an acclaimed author of bestselling fiction whose most recent book was a nonfiction investigation of Melungeon ancestry entitled Kinfolks: Falling off the Family Tree. She returns to fiction with Washed in the Blood, forthcoming this fall from Mercer University Press. Alther’s new novel portrays the early history of the southern Appalachians. It tells the story of several generations of the Martin family, from the arrival of Diego Martin as a hog drover with a Spanish exploring party in the 16th century, describing his descendants’ struggles to survive and gain acceptance down through the early 20th century.  In this new novel, Alther connects Melungeon history to early settlement of the Southeastern US, and thus to the theme of 15th Union…

For more information, click here.