Mixed Race Studies

Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Arthé A. Anthony, “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Volume 36, Number 3 (1995): 310.

“Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans

The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995)
pages 291-312

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles

On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio,
on sunny Sunday afternoons
when the kids look all new
and far too clean to stay that way,
and Harlem has its
washed-and-ironed-and-cleaned-best out,
the ones who’ve crossed the line
to live downtown
miss you,
Harlem of the bitter dream,
since their dream has
come true.

—Langston Hughes, 1951

Racial passing is a well-known theme in pre-World War II African-American literature. Adrian Piper’s recent essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” is an example of continued interest in the topic. In addition, “passing” is used in cultural studies as a metaphor for masking the real-and most often marginalized-self. This article examines racial passing, with an emphasis on the lives of black Creole women, in relation to the economic impact of racial repression and segregation on black life in New Orleans. My conclusions are drawn, in large part, from an analysis of thirty extensive oral history interviews that I conducted with eighteen women and twelve men born between 1885 and 1905, and living in downtown New Orleans in 1977. Each of the men and women that I interviewed thought of themselves as “Creole,” and participated in the familial and social networks of the city’s black Creole community.

Their occupations and educations were representative of the choices then available in New Orleans. All of them worked, although the kind of work that they did changed over the life cycle; they were primarily cigar makers, seamstresses, skilled craftsmen in the building trades, postal carriers, printers, and school teachers. A few of them attended the city’s private high schools and normal schools, an accomplishment that has to be understood within the context of the limited availability of an education-private or public-for African-Americans at the turn of the century. Many others were forced to terminate their educations, in more than one instance as early as the third grade, to begin working, whereas others finished apprenticeships. Their personal lives were equally varied as reflected in the extended, nuclear and augmented households in which they lived, and their individual experiences with parenting, divorce and remarriage, as well as widowhood and desertion. Most, but not all of them, were Catholics. Despite their individual differences, as a group the Creoles of color that I interviewed shared first-hand experiences with hard work and racial discrimination. The women-a group that has been overlooked in New Orleans historiography-experienced both racial and sexual discrimination.

Each of the men and women I interviewed offered insightful interpretations of the worlds in which they lived. They were all very familiar with the myriad practices of racial passing; although they were not all light-skinned, they all knew of individuals-often a parent, spouse or friend-who had passed. More important than examples of the intricate mechanics of passing were their observations about the reasons individuals did so. Lillian Gelbart Simonet, for example, born in 1904, identified a relationship between passing for white and poverty when she remarked:

There are whole families of these people in New Orleans, (who are not necessarily Creoles), who have just been absorbed and gone to various parts of the country and they’re white. Sometimes you just can’t blame them because they have had a hard time. Creole people, with all of the airs, had a hard time to get along [because] they [the young women] would not be domestics. Some were fortunate enough to get work at El Trelles, a cigar factory . . . and Wallace Marine had a cigar factory . . . they weren’t prepared to do any kind of work that required any kind of education at all because half of them hadn’t finished high school.”

The observations of Mrs. Simonet, a retired public school teacher, call attention to the limited opportunities available to the majority of black Creoles who were poor and uneducated, unlike herself.

In the larger scheme of twentieth-century American race categorization, individuals were either black or white. Individual whites may have had preferences for light-skinned or dark-skinned African-Americans in their employ.  But overall the ethnic and cultural nuances and phenotypical differences that were critical to the intraracial dynamics of the black community were disregarded by whites in the segregated economy of New Orleans in the 1900s-1920s. Many Creoles of Color consequently were willing to accept the risks of passing for white rather than suffer the deteriorating material and social conditions endured by persons living and working as “colored.”…

…Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection

Indiana University Press
2011-12-23
236 pages
Paper 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4

Nadine Ehlers, Professor
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler’s account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 “racial fraud” case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault’s later work on ethics and “technologies of the self” to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Racial Disciplinarity
• 2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
• 3. Passing through Racial Performatives
• 4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
• 5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
• 6. Imagining Racial Agency
• 7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
• Bibliography
• Index

Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path

Caxton Press
2006
264 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-87004-450-8

Nancy M. Peterson

Nancy M. Peterson tells the stories of mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world.

In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training whites provided and used them to help their people. They found differing paths—medicine, music, crafts, the classroom, the lecture hall, the stage, the written word—and walked strong and tall.

These women did far more than survive; they extended a hand to help their people find a place in a hard new future.

Cave Canem Prize Winner Iain Haley Pollock: An Interview

Michigan Quarterly Review
February 2011

Dilruba Ahmed

Meet Iain Haley Pollock: Philadelphia-based poet, English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy, and co-host with his partner Naomi of an occasional culinary smackdown based on “Iron Chef.”  Iain’s first book of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and will be published in June 2011 by the University of Georgia Press.  I conducted the following interview with Iain via e-mail, but you might imagine the ambient noise of Hobbes Coffeshop in Swarthmore, PA, where Iain and I have met from time to time to talk about poems:  a whirring espresso machine and clattering mugs.  Fork tines clinking into bowls of an elusive truffled macaroni that suddenly disappeared from the local menu.  The tap-tap of Iain adding more ketchup* to his macaroni.  And amid the clamor of the everyday, the sound of Iain reading aloud a remarkable poem called “Chorus of X, the Rescuers’ Mark,” a poem that I am thrilled to share here in an audio clip as part of this interview, along with Iain’s comments on the major preoccupations of his manuscript, poetic inspiration and form, and the recent controversy over Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change.”
 
Tell us a bit about the book’s evolution.  When did you begin these poems? Did you envision them as part of a manuscript when you began, or did some themes and threads emerge as your work unfolded?

Well, I’m a grandiose sum’bitch, so I think of poems (and evolution) in terms of space and time.  While the places I’d lived before–Southern California, D.C., Utica, Boston–factored into the content of poems, they were all written in Syracuse, Greensburg, Pa. and Philadelphia.  And the poems are located in time between the first Portuguese incursions into Africa and waiting, about two years ago, for my partner Naomi to come home from work.  In writing about moments along this continuum, I was drawn to the presence of history in the daily and of the daily in history.
 
I never thought of the poems as a cohesive manuscript–I aimed for “best words, best order”–but was surprised to see themes emerge from my preoccupations of the past several years: race mixing, death, and marriage…

…In “Port of Origin: Lancaster,” you write of a speaker who knows of his “black mother’s blood” as well as his “white father’s city.” Is this speaker twice exiled, so to speak? How does your speaker grapple with his hybrid identity (if that’s an accurate description)? In the “The Recessive Gene,” for example, we see him attempt to “scrape” his way to a new complexion.

Someone once called me a “hybrid” at a party. Made me proud to have such an obviously small carbon footprint, but the intent was likely to package me into the de rigueur post-colonial theory of the moment. I’ll leave to the critics any thoughts about the Calibanic nature of my speakers. I’m hoping that in the poems about mixed-race identity that mixed-race folks see some of their own experience in the poems, and that other folks find a reflection of any doubleness in their own identity…

Read the entire article here.

In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby

Skinner House Books (an imprint of the Unitarian Universalist Association)
2008-10-15
288 pages
Product Code: 6989
ISBN-13: 978-1558965416; ISBN-10: 9781558965416

Mark D. Morrison-Reed

Frank personal account of growing up black during the era of the civil rights movement. The author wrestles with racism, the death of Martin Luther King, black radicalism, his interracial family, and his experience as one of the first black Unitarian Universalist ministers.

In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby gives voice to the unspoken story of those Afro Americans who were among the first to bring racial diversity to their neighborhood, school, church or workplace, to the increasing number of partners in interracial relationships and to those blessed with and yet struggling to raise multiracial children in a polarized world.

Mark Morrison Reed discusses the creation of In Between in the video below.

Profit, Power, & Privilege: The Racial Politics of Ancestry
 
American Anthropological Association Meetings
November 18, 2000
San Francisco, California

Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
Duke University

In March of this year each of you received your decennial census, and you were confronted, once again, by those ominous racial boxes. This time, however, you could go ahead and check more than one box. Your ability to check more than one box was a compromise worked out by the Commerce Department and two opposing efforts to lobby the Administration. One effort was launched by people that identify as bi-racial, or of mixed race descent, and who wanted their own box. The other effort was led by the NAACP and the National Council of La Razza who argued that the boxes should remain the same. Although virtually every Latino, Black, or Native American person should go ahead and check “all of the above,” the powerful bi-racial lobby did not want to force their constituents to “choose” between identifying with one ancestor or another. The NAACP and others argued that the census was about identification—not identity—and pressed the Administration to make an accurate count of people who are identified as racial minorities, to gain a better understanding of inter-city demographics, and to maintain the ability to demonstrate disparate impact. These organizations wanted to be able to account for all people identified as black, Hispanic, etc. In this case, the bi-racial lobby viewed race as a proxy for ancestry while the NAACP viewed race as a proxy for political status.

Several months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigenous Hawaiians could not vote in a state-wide election for the commissioners of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an agency that allocates resources set aside when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Since these resources were for the explicit purpose of bettering ” the conditions of Native Hawaiians,” only indigenous Hawaiians could vote for commissioners. The Court deemed the election unconstitutional and invoked the rarely used 15th Amendment, which provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy explained in his majority opinion that “ancestry can be a proxy for race” and therefore ruled the elections unconstitutional. However, elections held by Indian tribes remained Constitutional, Kennedy argued, because of their “unique political status.”

A few years ago, the Lumbee Tribe of Pembroke, North Carolina petitioned the U.S. Congress for federally designated tribal status. At stake was over 70 million federal dollars targeted for health and education. Although members of the Lumbee Tribe have made treaties with the federal government, number 40,000, are recognized as a tribe by the state of North Carolina, and enjoy a very salient “political status,” the federal government in 1994 refused to recognize their tribal status because they did not meet the stringent requirements imposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part of the BIA requirements includes tracing descent from a “historic tribe.” The Lumbees, however, have a mixed ancestry that includes decedents from earlier Hatteras and Cheraw groups. Unlike Western tribes, the Lumbees have participated in the crosscurrents of culture since 1585 when Sir Walter Raleigh embarked upon his ill-fated colony. For centuries, the Lumbees have absorbed the culture and people from neighboring black, white, and Indian populations and today are hard-pressed to meet the requirements set by the BIA that simply ignore processes of culture change. In this case, the Lumbees viewed political status as a proxy for ancestry, but Congress did not.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is the historical end product of a gamy mix of social, political, and economic pressures grinding against each other. Like the tectonics of the earth’s plates, it’s usually slow and predictable, but one never knows when these forces will erupt or quake- forever changing the social landscape. (Here in California, tectonics of all kinds are particularly volatile). Although the outcomes of the cases I briefly described seemed more like a game of “rock-scissors-paper,” they fall within the slow and predictable racial tectonics. From the centuries old “one-drop” rule to the complex fractions used to claim tribal membership; race, culture, and heritage, have always been used inconsistently in a struggle to define social, political, and economic relationships. W.E.B. Du Bois once penned that the concept of race was “a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies” (Du Bois 1986b:651).

I have long thought that this was one of the best definitions of race, but it does not get us very far. Anthropologists are supposed to identify patterns in process, but it is often difficult when such salient modalities in American culture are used willy-nilly by even our most esteemed institutions. Although it appears in the above cases that race, ancestry, and political status are applied in a sort of catch-as-catch-can manner, there is a simple and usually predictable logic that shapes these “contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies”—Profit, Power, and Privilege. Like the investigative reporter who “follows the money,” a scholar is well served if he or she looks for the way people use race to acquire or protect any one of these three “Ps.”…

…Individuals who yoke their identity to categories of race often miss the fact that most people stitch together an ethnic identity from various cultural heritages, and that cultural identity has nothing to do with racial categories. This distinction between race and ethnicity is thrown into vivid relief when I used to walk out my back door and stroll down 125th Street—affectionately know as the “Heart of Harlem.” The everyday lives of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitian, Nigerians, and African Americans commingle and converge in this community in a way that has transposed historic segregation into a form of congregation that exhibits the rich tapestry of the African diaspora.

The question remains, why does the mixed-race lobby insist on using ancestry as a proxy for race? I think the answers lies in the one argument I have not seen made by members of this lobbying effort. People advocating for a mixed race category should also advocate that every racial minority check that box too. Barring recent immigrants, virtually no person today considered Black, Indian, or Hawaiian can trace an uninterrupted genealogy back to Africa, Hawaii, or ancestral tribe. Moreover, everyone with a mythical “Cherokee grandmother,” should be encouraged to check that box.

In lieu of this argument, it appears that these advocates are trying to institutionalize a mixed race category, which in other countries at least, turns on a claim to white privilege. We can learn from South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and even in Louisiana and South Carolina that efforts to institutionalize, not a hybrid heritage, but a mixed race category, actually advances racial injustice and allocates white privilege into the haves, have nots, and have some….

Read the entire paper here.

Science: Passers

TIME Magazine
1946-08-12

Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation’s Negroes—as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. “It is now estimated,” wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier’s last week, “that there are at least between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 persons in the U.S., supposed to be white, who possess Negro blood… Authorities generally agree that between 15,000 and 30,000… Negroes go over to the white side every year.”

Author Asbury’s conclusions are disputed by Sociologist John H. Burma of Grinnell College, who thinks the “authorities” exaggerate. In the American Journal of Sociology he argues that the number of Negroes passing as whites is much smaller.

Facts about Negro “passing” are understandably hard to come by. Guesstimates have depended largely on a pioneering study made in 1921 by Duke University Sociologist Hornell Hart.

Analyzing the U.S. census, he discovered an odd discrepancy in the population of native whites: between 1900 and 1910, the group which was aged 10 to 14 in 1900 somehow grew instead of shrinking. When deaths and emigrations were totaled and deducted, the group mysteriously gained 170,000 in population. Other studies showed that every year some 20,000 Negroes unaccountably disappeared from the census statistics. The obvious explanation: the Negroes had become native “whites.”

Read the entire article here.

British-Asian cinema: the sequel

The Guardian
2011-02-17

Sarfraz Manzoor

Aqib Khan in West Is West.

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Ayub Khan-Din was in his first year at drama school in Salford when his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Khan-Din, the mixed-race son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Catholic mother, found that each time he came home, another slab of his mother’s memory had disappeared. The past, with all its stories, was slipping into the void, and Khan-Din became determined to try to preserve his parents’ history and his own experience of growing up.

Although he was studying to be an actor, Khan-Din started writing. At the time, Asians were rarely glimpsed on screen in the UK unless they were being beaten up by racist skinheads, running corner shops or fleeing arranged marriages. Khan-Din wanted to tell a different story—about growing up with a Pakistani father who had married an English woman, but who wanted his boys to marry Pakistani girls. The play Khan-Din wrote, East Is East, was performed on stage, then released to great acclaim as a film in 1999. Now, 12 years on, comes the release of West Is West, Khan-Din’s long-awaited sequel…

…Like Khan-Din and Monica Ali—whose novel Brick Lane would later be adapted for the screen—Kureishi grew up in a mixed-race family. The particular conflicts inherent in such a background, and the subsequent struggles for identity, were not shared by those such as Chadha and Syal, whose parents were both Asian. My Beautiful Laundrette was not only a personal work but also, Kureishi suggests, the product of an emerging curiosity of mainstream Britain about Asian society. “Around the mid-80s, people in film and publishing realised that Britain was changing,” he says. “I was lucky because I had this great opportunity to write about something that no one else had written about.” The freshness of this material to a wider audience meant many of the films that have come out of the British-Asian subgenre—including Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic, based on another Kureishi short story—operate not only as fictional works but also as quasi-documentaries, revealing a hitherto unknown world. The frisson of familiarity felt by Asian audiences on seeing families like theirs was coupled by the shock of the new that white audiences experienced…

Read the entire article here.

A “Mixed-Race” Nation Isn’t the Same as a Post-Race One

ColorLines
2011-02-04

Dom Apollon

The Web is still buzzing with chatter over a New York Times feature last weekend that explored how and why an increasing number of young people identify as “mixed-race.” The Census Bureau will release race-based data from its 2010 decennial count later this month, and everybody from sociologists to marketers are eagerly waiting to see what the next generation of Americans, dubbed the “Millennials,” looks like. If the Times story is correct, a whole lot more of them are people who aren’t invested in a racial identity—or, at least not a singular one.

But the story got me thinking about focus groups I’ve been conducting for the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, over the past few months. We’re talking in Los Angeles with separate groups of 18 to 25 year old African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Whites. Our project is not yet complete, but already the conversations we’ve heard within our four groups, including with a handful of respondents from multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds, suggest a significant gap between the sort of individual identities that the Times explored and the broader reality in which those young, post-identity people live.

It’d be easy for the casual reader to conclude from the Times piece that this growing group of individuals who refuse to be pigeon-holed into distinct racial or ethnic classifications will inevitably transform our society into one without racial prejudice. As the Times’ reporter explained, optimistic observers “say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.”

Well, that sounds so nice and inevitable, doesn’t it? The problem is, it’s an optimism born of our society’s collective, subconscious yearning for relief. Relief from what, you ask? Relief from the deep discomfort we continue to feel about race, and the continued racial disparities (in high school and college graduation, unemployment, wages and work standards, homeownership, etc.) that challenge America’s understanding of itself as a place defined by equal opportunity…

…But the fact that some young folks are ticking off multiple boxes on surveys to express their racial and ethnic identities doesn’t mean much if the opportunity gap between whites and people of color throughout society is not changing, too. When we see less disparity in outcomes in education, in health and health care, in housing and more, then we’ll know we’re approaching something close to a “post-racial” society…

Read the entire article here.