Mixed Race Studies

Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

Arcade Publishing
April 2007
264 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 1559708328; ISBN-13: 9781559708326
Paperback ISBN-10: 1-55970-876-X; ISBN-13: 978-1-55970-876-0

Lisa Alther

Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir.

Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther’s mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia, and every day they reenacted the Civil War at home. Then a babysitter with bad teeth told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people—often with extra thumbs—living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, or of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or the children of frontiersman, African slaves, and Native Americans? Lisa set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.

Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Kinfolks shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.

INTRODUCTION

Many People are born believing they know who they are. They’re Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don’t share that enviable luxury.

My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.

In my life since, I’ve often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I’m one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.

But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I’ve ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.

I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I’d inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.

Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.

Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.

Growing up, I’d heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent’s showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father’s family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.

For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I’d learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others—all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.

In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.

I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers—and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I’d been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.

For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I’d finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere—and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world…

Daniel Sharfstein awarded Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by Fletcher Foundation

Vanderbilt University Law School
2011-07-06

Daniel J. Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has been awarded an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by the Fletcher Foundation.
 
Professor Sharfstein’s new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, examines the history of race in the United States through three families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities. He will use the Fletcher Fellowship, which provides awards of $50,000 to fund research and support literary and artistic works that contribute to improving race relations and further the broad social goals of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to chronicle a group of Southern lawyers who argued against integration in courts during the decade following Brown…

Read the entire article here.

Do You See Your Family?: An Examination of Racially Mixed Characters & Families in Children’s Picture Books Available in School Media Centers

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2002
37 pages

Susan S. Lovett

A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Library Science.

This study describes a survey of public elementary schools in Wake County, North Carolina determining what picture books that include mixed-race characters or mixed-race families are available and which are most commonly collected in public school media centers. Fifty-two of the seventy-nine elementary school media centers in the Wake County Public School System responded. Thirty-four titles that included a mixed-race character or a mixed-race family, where the family was not multiracial due to adoption, are identified. Nine titles prove to be highly collected, eleven titles are somewhat collected, and fourteen titles are rarely collected. Half of the highly collected titles are award winners, whereas the mid and rarely collected category books have not won any awards. The parental racial combinations vary, but the prevalent pairing is African American/Caucasian. Titles appear to be collected more because they are award-winning than because they represent a non-Caucasian population. The majority of elementary school media specialists have never been asked to find materials that include mixed-race characters or families. Overall, few of these books exist, and fewer still are collected in school media centers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Table of Tables
• Introduction
• Literature Review
• Research Questions
• Methodology
  • Locating Mixed Race Materials
  • Instrument
  • Procedure
• Findings & Discussion
• Conclusions
• Future Research
• References
• Appendices
  • Appendix A – School Media Collection Survey Instrument
  • Appendix B – Survey Data Arranged by Quantity Owned
  • Appendix C – Annotated Picture Books

TABLE OF TABLES

• Table 1 – Identified Picture Books with Racially Mixed Characters or Families
• Table 2 – Highly Collected Titles
• Table 3 – Mid Collected Titles
• Table 4 – Rarely Collected Titles
• Table 5 – Total Racially Mixed Picture Book Collection per Media Center
• Table 6 – Titles Suggested by Surveyed Media Specialists
• Table 7 – Racial Pairings per Title

Read the entire paper here.

White Skin, White Masks: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique and Louisiana

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2006
83 pages

Michael James Rulon

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature

Through an examination of two Creole passing subjects from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White’s 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia’s 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists’ difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

Table of Contents

• 1. Pawòl Douvan/Some Opening Words
• 2. Nwè, Blan èk Kréyòl/Black, White, and Creole
• 3. Mimi èk Isaure/Mimi and Isaur
• 4. Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black
• 5. Ovwè tè kréyòl/Goodbye, Creole Land
• 6. Conclusion: Èk alòs… /And so
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Cross-Heart People: Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western

Journal of Popular Film and Television
Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2003)
pages 181-196
DOI: 10.1080/01956050309602855

Joanna Hearne, Assistant Professor of English
University of Missouri

The author examines the visualization of Indianness in the context of cross-racial romance and in relation to the emergence of the Western genre in early silent film. Popular attitudes toward Indian assimilation and United States policy are traced through the cinematic versions of The Squaw Man and other “Indian dramas” from 1908 to 1916.

…the heir is always the one who stays on the land.
—Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice, 1990

Silent Westerns and “Indian dramas” from 1908 to 1916 provide a remarkable window on Euro-American popular culture representations of the encounter between tribal peoples and the United States military and educational establishments. These early Westerns, many of them now unknown or unavailable outside of archives, provide a composite narrative that depicts the white “family on the land” emerging from the “broken home” of a previous mixed-race marriage, and that equates children, land, and gold as the spoils of failed romance, not of war. The ordeal of separating children from their families and cultures through the Indian boarding-school policy—and the trauma of their return home as outsiders—is fully recognized in silent Westerns, which were produced during a time when federal Indian policy encouraged both assimilation and removal from the land. In these tales of interracial romance, captivity, and adoption, defining narrative features include doubling, mistaken identity, and the social and geographic displacement and replacement of persons. Such narrative strategies reflected the physical acts of displacement and replacement that have been hallmarks of U.S. American Indian policy, from Indian Removal and the Indian Wars through the slow erosion of reservation lands in the twentieth century.

The Squaw Man (Apfel and De Mille, 1914), the first feature-length Western, offers a particularly influential example of the pattern. The film tells the story of James Wynnegate, a refugee from the corrupt English aristocracy, as he establishes a new life for himself in the American West. Jim’s attempt at ranching fails, but in the process he has an affair with Nat-u-Ritch, the daughter of the local Indian chief. When he finds her making a tiny pair of moccasins, he rushes to get a pastor, who refuses to marry the cross-racial couple. Jim’s ranch hands try to talk him out of the marriage as well, until he shows them the moccasins. The ranch hands then force the pastor at gunpoint to perform the ceremony in a racially inflected version of the “shot-gun marriage.”…

…The plot—adapted from Edwin Milton Royle and Julie Opp Faversham’s successful stage play and 1906 novel—is a defining one for cross-racial romance narratives, and the film is a major landmark in the evolution of American cinema. Adapted for the screen three times by Cecil B. De Mille, in 1914, 1918, and 1931, The Squaw Man launched both his directing career and Samuel Goldfish’s Lasky Feature Play Co., which would later become the major studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Why does The Squaw Man narrative—differing as it does from the early Westerns of Tom Mix, and certainly from such later iterations of the genre as John Ford’s Stagecoach—hold such a crucial place in the development of the Western? And why does this story emerge so strongly in the first two decades of the twentieth century? Why does this film, and others based on it, link Indian women’s marriage to white men with the women’s suicide? What is the significance of the forced separation of Indian mother and mixed-blood child that forms the heart of the film’s conflict, as one family gives way to another?…

…Contemporaneous with Westerns and “Indian dramas” such as The Squaw Man, the writings of native and mixed-blood writers such as E. Pauline Johnson, Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket), John Joseph Mathews, and D’Arcy McNickle provide an indigenous literary context for—and counterpoint to—popular representations of native people. Pauline Johnson’s short stories, including “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” “As It Was in the Beginning,” and “The Derelict,” emphasize the strength of Indian women and moral weakness of white men in cross-racial relationships. Mourning Dove’s novel Cogewea, first published in 1927, narrates the betrayal of the mixed-blood protagonist Cogewea by her white lover. Other native writers depict the emotional impact of family separation and boarding-school education. D’Arcy McNickle was himself forced to attend the Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Oregon, despite his own and his parents’ objections (Child 13), and writes about children being taken to boarding school in his short story “Train Time” (Peyer). Gertrude Bonnin, who attended missionary Indian schools and later taught at Carlisle, wrote about the failure of missionary education to prepare a Lakota man to care for his family and community in “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.” Native writers working against representations in popular literature and film also highlight issues of inheritance, Indian policy, boarding schools, and cross-racial relationships and mixed-blood children but offer alternative points of view based on personal experience, political advocacy, and cultural authority…

Read the entire article here.

This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is a huge ideological debate occurring within critical mixed-race studies circles about just what mixed race is and is not, about whether or not supporting it requires belief in the fallacy of biological race, about how much it does or does not advance the cause of white supremacy (whether overtly and knowingly or not), and about the propriety of the disproportionate influence of white mothers of black/white children within the multiracial movement.

The only boundary being pushed by the “Race Remixed” series is the continued fencing off of any significant input (beyond that sentence or two acknowledged above) by scholars who are critical of multiracial identity. If this thoroughly unbalanced series wanted to actually provide real news, it would dare to investigate how multiraciality poses a danger to civil rights compliance monitoring, how multiraciality is assisting certain persons of Hispanic and Asian descent in their transition to “honorary whiteness” while persons of African descent remain barred from doing the same, and how the multiracial movement remains absolutely exclusionary in terms of setting itself apart from the nearly 40 million Afro-Americans of mixed descent in this country. If that thoroughly mixed population is not mixed race, then no one is.

Rainier Spencer (Professor and author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, 2011), Reader’s Comments (#49) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=49#comment49

More than a ‘tragic mulatto’

Runnymede Bulletin
Spring 2011, Issue 365
pages 26

Zaki Nahaboo
Department of Politics & International Studies
The Open University, UK

Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. London: Routledge, 2009, 186 pp. Hardback ISBN 978-0-415-87226-3, Paperback ISBN 978-0-415-89391-6, eBook ISBN 978-0-203-85736-6.

Daniel McNeil illuminates harrowing accounts and insidious perceptions of mixed-race that exist across Canada, America and Britain. His monograph charts the transgression of the ‘colour-line’, exploring the subjectivity of those compelled to negotiate a mixed-race heritage while providing a critical intervention into the discourse of mixed-race as the contemporary cosmopolitan signifier of a post-racial future. These issues leap from the pages as he draws upon influential figures and popular culture ranging from Philippa Schuyler to Barack Obama.

As the title suggests, these issues cannot be analysed without considering the gendered forms of violence and the masculine structuring of desire, which snare the mixed race woman, particularly, between a rock and a hard place.

This is best exemplified in the second chapter of the book, in which McNeil seeks to uncover the linkages between the likes of W. E. B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and Otto Rank. McNeil does not undermine recent poststructuralist readings of these theorists, instead choosing to delve into their perceptions about the mulatto. Here he finds that within their masculinist framework the mixed-race woman, in particular, is perceived as a hindrance, a problem, a neurotic and an object of pity. McNeil has provided a novel contribution, subtly showing that mixed-race is not simply a position of the petty bourgeoisie, but rather is seen as a shameful reminder of colonialism and ‘dilution’.

McNeil’s account of renowned American child prodigy Philippa Schuyler is a strategically deployed case study for elucidating a far more complex identity than the ‘tragic mulatto‘: i.e. “a feminised and neurotic figure who desires a white lover and either dies or returns to the black community”. Schuyler’s life is deployed to expose how the black/white binary is paradoxically and simultaneously transcended, escaped, denied and repudiated, while also remaining a continuous weight upon her life…

Read the entire review here.

Seeing in color – art and mixed race

Laura Kina’s Art Blog
2011-07-06

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

I was reviewing an Asian American marketing book (Many Cultures One Market by Robert Kumaki and Jack Moran) and getting my toenails painted dark fuchsia pink, just a few steps from blood red, at a neighborhood Vietnamese nail salon when I got a text that the New York Times article I’ve been waiting for had finally come out: Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice by Felicia Lee.

The article highlights, amongst others, the recent Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, works by authors such as Heidi Durrow and Danzy Senna, filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearn’s “One Big Hapa Family” and artist Kip Fulbeck’s traveling exhibition Part Asian/100% Hapa.

In the hours that followed, my inbox blew up with comments on mixed race (see the Critical Mixed Race Studies Facebook wall and the comments on the NY Times article). I kept thinking that what was missing here (both in the article and the online commentary) was a discussion of the artwork itself in terms of form and aesthetics and the different ways the various art forms (literature, film, spoken word, performance, visual arts etc.) change the terms of discussion on mixed race and how we might see (or read, or hear, or feel and experience) color…

Read the entire article here.

Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice

The New York Times
2011-07-05

Felicia R. Lee

Heidi Durrow, left, and Fanshen Cox, the co-producers of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival. (Ann Johansson for The New York Times)

Note from Steven F. Riley: Please make sure to view the many reader comments for the article here.

Race Remixed: Articles in this series explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.

For years Heidi W. Durrow heard the refrain: editors wouldn’t publish her novel because readers couldn’t relate to a protagonist who was part black and part Danish. But when that novel, “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky,” was finally published last year (after about four dozen rejections, said Ms. Durrow, who is, of course, black and Danish), the coming-of-age story landed on best-seller lists.

Today Ms. Durrow finds herself in the elite precincts of The New Yorker and National Public Radio — which a few weeks ago began the Summer Blend Book Club, featuring works about multiracial people…

…“The national images of racially mixed people have dramatically changed just within the last few years, from ‘mulattoes’ as psychically divided, racially impure outcasts to being hip new millennials who attractively embody the resolution of America’s race problem,” said Michele Elam, an associate professor of English at Stanford University.

Both images, she said, are wrongheaded and reductive.

Much of the work by mixed-race artists, though certainly not all of it, reveals the fault lines and pressure points that still exist in a rapidly changing America. It is on these rough edges that many multiracial people live, and where many artists find the themes that animate their work: the limits of tolerance, hidden or unacknowledged assumptions about identity, and issues of racial privilege and marginalization.

“These images and narratives are not just entertaining,” said Ms. Elam, who is also the author of “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.” “They can influence, both consciously and unconsciously, how we think about race today in our nation.”…

…To support and showcase artists telling their stories of the mixed experience, Ms. Durrow and Fanshen Cox, a biracial actor and Ms. Durrow’s best friend, created the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles in 2008…

Read the entire aritcle here.  View the reader comments here.

Puerto Rico: Afro-Caribbean and Taíno Identity

Repeating Islands: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts
2011-06-26

Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Note from Steven F. Riley:  [The number of 2010 census repondents from Puerto Rico identifiying as two or more races (TOMR) decreased by 22.82% over the last decade. New York was the only other commonwealth/state with a TOMR decrease; which was 0.73%.]

The number of Puerto Ricans that identify only as black or Native American has increased by about 50 percent in the last decade, according to the latest census figures, which have surprised experts. “The increase suggests a growing sense of racial identity among the various ethnic groups that for a long time have been considered a heterogeneous mosaic in this Commonwealth of United States” writes AOL Noticias.

However, experts consider that it is too early to explain the reason for the change. “This really breaks with a historical pattern,” says Jorge Duany, professor of anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico. With the growth in those who consider themselves black or Native American, there was a decrease in the percentage of the population of Puerto Ricans who only identify as white. This group dropped almost 8 percentage points, to about 76% of the 3.7 million inhabitants of the island. More than 461,000 islanders identified solely as black, an increase of 52%, while close to 20,000 said that they were Native Americans, an increase of almost 49%.

According to experts, several factors could have influenced the increase in the number of people who identify as black. Duany explains that the choice of Barack Obama as President of United States could have influenced some who see themselves as black, because the leader dissipated negative stereotypes about race. The increase in the number of blacks also coincided with a push to highlight the black population of Puerto Rico, as the Department of Education included for the first time a high school textbook dealing exclusively with its history. Moreover, there was a base effort aimed at dark-skinned Puerto Ricans through social networks such as Facebook to urge them to identify as “afro-puertorriqueños” [Afro-Puerto Ricans] in the 2010 census…

Read the entire post here.