Mixed Race Studies

The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”.

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002)
pages 65-106

J. Douglas Smith

In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed explorer and ethnographer, organized Post No. 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. By the following June the organization claimed four hundred members in Richmond alone and had added new groups throughout the state, all dedicated to “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization.” For the next ten years Powell and his supporters dominated racial discourse in the Old Dominion; successfully challenged the legislature to redefine blacks, whites, and Indians; used the power of a state agency to enforce the law with impunity fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of mixed-race Virginians; and threatened the essence of the state’s devotion to paternalistic race relations.

The racial extremism and histrionics of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs have attracted the attention of both legal scholars and southern historians, particularly those interested in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the major legislative achievement of the organization, and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed three centuries of miscegenation statutes in the United States. Historian Richard B. Sherman, for instance, has focused on the organization’s leaders, “a small but determined group of racial zealots who rejected the contention of most southern whites in the 1920s that the “race question was settled.” Sherman, who has written the most detailed account of the legislative efforts of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, has argued in the pages of the Journal of Southern History that the leaders of the organization constituted a “dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites.” Convinced that increasing numbers of persons with traces of black blood were passing as white, they made a “Last Stand” against racial amalgamation.

While Sherman is certainly correct that the Anglo-Saxon Clubs owed their success to the commitment of their leaders, their views and policies resonated with a much broader swath of the white population. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs did not merely manipulate the racial fears and prejudices of whites but also tapped into the same assumptions that undergirded the entire foundation of white supremacy and championed segregation as a system of racial hierarchy and control. The call for racial integrity appealed especially to elite whites in Virginia who were obsessed with genealogy and their pristine bloodlines. Lady Astor, for instance, reportedly informed her English friends that they lacked the purity of the white inhabitants of the Virginia Piedmont. “We are undiluted,” she proclaimed. Author Emily Clark satirized this prevailing view in Richmond when one of her characters remarked, “for here alone, in all America, flourished the Anglo-Saxon race, untainted, pure, and perfect.” White elites across Virginia gave their support to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and allowed Powell’s message a hearing: state senators and delegates approved legislation; governors publicly advocated the aims of the organization; some of the most socially prominent women in Richmond joined the ladies auxiliary; and influential newspapers offered editorial support and provided a public platform for the dissemination of the organization’s extreme views…

…In addition to exposing a fundamental weakness in the system of managed race relations, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs unintentionally revealed the absurdity of the basic assumption that underlay their mission: it proved impossible to divide the state, or the nation for that matter, into readily identifiable races. The longer they waged their campaign, the more apparent it became that they could not divine the precise amount of nonwhite blood in a given individual. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs met a great deal of resistance from individuals and communities who rejected the clubs’ particular construction of racial identity. Communities across the state revealed a variability in race relations that confounded those most committed to a discrete, binary definition of race…

…Although Powell and Cox initially placed their efforts within the broader nativist context of the national debate over federal immigration policy, they soon ceased to mention immigration at all. (11) Instead, they focused their energies toward “achieving a final solution” to the “negro problem.” Their ultimate concern, as they suggested in lengthy articles in the Times-Dispatch, was to prevent “White America” from devolving into a “Negroid Nation.” Writing in July 1923, Powell argued that the passage of Jim Crow laws and the disfranchisement of blacks had “diverted the minds of our people from the most serious and fundamental peril, that is, the danger of racial amalgamation.” “It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters,” the pianist declared; “it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.” Powell acknowledged that Virginia’s laws already prevented the intermarriage of blacks and whites but warned that such laws did not necessarily “prevent intermixture.” He and his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs also believed that a 1910 Virginia statute that defined a black person as having at least one-sixteenth black blood no longer protected the integrity of the white race. Pointing to census figures that showed a decrease in the number of mulattoes in Virginia from 222,910 in 1910 to 164,171 in 1920, they argued that an increasing number of people with some black blood must be passing as white. Consequently, a new, “absolute” color line offered the only “possibility, if not the probability, of achieving a final solution.”

Powell’s analysis of census data, however, points to the absurdity of his campaign to define race in absolute terms. While Powell interpreted the steep drop in mulattoes as proof of increased passing, historian Joel Williamson argues that by the early twentieth century the only significant “mixing” occurred between lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. Even census officials warned in 1920 that “considerable uncertainty necessarily attaches to the classification of Negroes as black and mulatto, since the accuracy of the distinction depends largely upon the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.” Mulattoes in Virginia did not become white between 1910 and 1920 but rather became black. In fact, the census bureau did away with mulatto as a category for the 1930 enumeration…

…Although Powell was the Anglo-Saxon Clubs’ leading spokesman, Walter Plecker, as director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, was without a doubt the group’s primary enforcer. From 1924 until his retirement twenty-two years later, Plecker waged a campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at classifying all Virginians by race and identifying even the smallest traces of black blood in the state’s citizens. In short, the statistician operated on the belief that a person was guilty of being black until he or she could prove otherwise.

Plecker considered it his mission to encourage as many Virginians as possible to register with the state. Between ten and twenty thousand near-white Virginians, he noted, “possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.” Such people previously had been considered white, which had allowed them to demand “admittance of their children to white schools” and “in not a few cases” to marry whites. Although such people were “scarcely distinguished as colored,” they “are not white in reality.” Registration, he argued, would enable the Bureau of Vital Statistics to head off such trouble…

…Linking racial integrity and segregated schools assumed a level of critical importance as the General Assembly prepared to meet in January 1930. Revelations that a number of mixed-race children attended white schools in Essex County provided advocates of a stricter racial-definition law the means of persuasion that they had lacked in 1926 and 1928 when they were seen as unnecessarily harassing the state’s Indians. The situation in Essex County first developed in 1928 as local school officials took steps to remove from the white schools children considered mixed. One family resisted, hired a lawyer, and filed suit. In the Circuit Court of Essex County, school officials acknowledged that the children in question had less than one-sixteenth black blood. Consequently, Judge Joseph W. Chinn ruled that the children could not be kept out of white schools.

Chinn based his ruling on what racial integrity advocates had long understood as a loophole in the original legislation. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined a white person as an individual with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” making an exception only for certain Indians, and failed to define a black person. Furthermore, the act specifically prohibited the intermarriage of a white person with a nonwhite person, but it made no mention of the schools. Powell later testified that he had assumed that all persons not deemed white would be automatically classified black. But since the 1924 statute did not amend the 1910 act which termed blacks as persons with one-sixteenth or more black blood, an individual with less than one-sixteenth black blood could not be considered black, and therefore he or she could not be prevented from attending white schools.

A reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concluded that under Chinn’s ruling “any child having less than one-sixteenth Negro blood, not only can attend a white school, but must attend it, and is by law prevented from attending a colored school.” The judge’s opinion, moreover, opened the door for persons with less than one-sixteenth black blood to attend any of Virginia’s colleges or universities. In the wake of Chinn’s decision, local officials understood that their only avenue of relief lay with the state legislature passing a stricter law; consequently, sponsors introduced a measure that defined as black “any person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro Blood”—the so-called one-drop rule…

Mildred Loving

The Economist
2008-05-15

Mildred Loving, law-changer, died on May 2nd, aged 68

The loved each other. That must have been why they decided to get their marriage certificate framed and to hang it up in the bedroom of their house. There was little else in the bedroom, save the bed. Certainly nothing worth locking the front door for on a warm July night in 1958 in Central Point, Virginia. No one came this way, ten miles off the Richmond Turnpike into the dipping hills and the small, poor, scattered farmhouses, unless they had to. But Mildred Loving was suddenly woken to the crash of a door and a torch levelled in her eyes.

All the law enforcement of Caroline county stood round the bed: Sheriff Garnett Brooks, his deputy and the jailer, with guns at their belts. They might have caught them in the act. But as it was, the Lovings were asleep. All the men saw was her black head on the pillow, next to his.

She didn’t even think of it as a Negro head, especially. Her hair could easily set straight or wavy. That was because she had Indian blood, Cherokee from her father and Rappahannock from her mother, as well as black. All colours of people lived in Central Point, blacks with milky skin and whites with tight brown curls, who all passed the same days feeding chickens or smelling tobacco leaves drying, and who all had to use different counters from pure whites when they ate lunch in Bowling Green. They got along. If there was any race Mrs Loving considered herself, it was Indian, like Princess Pocahontas. And Pocahontas had married a white man…

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Loving Indian Style: Maintaining Racial Caste and Tribal Sovereignty Through Sexual Assimilation

Wisconsin Law Review
Volume 2007, Number 2 (2007-01-12)
pages 410-461

Carla D. Pratt, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Educational Equity; Nancy J. LaMont Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law
Pennsylvania State University

I. Introduction

When the United States Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statute forty years ago, everyone understood that the Court was eroding the formal barrier between blacks and whites. Although there has been healthy disagreement about Loving v. Virginia, including whether it provides the precedent for legal endorsement of same-sex marriage, scholars generally agree that the Virginia statute which Loving struck down was not a law proscribing miscegenation generally, but merely prohibiting miscegenation with a white person. Commentators have generally recognized the Virginia legislators’ choice to structure the law in this way as being aimed at preserving white racial purity and ensuring that white women were reserved exclusively for white men. Ostensibly the law was insouciant regarding the intimate relations of people of color, but a closer look betrays its impact on interracial relations between people of color.

Further, state miscegenation laws that ultimately permitted whites to marry Indians aided the assimilation of Indians into mainstream white America by operating as a form of racial rehabilitation. Indian assimilation, however, required more than Indians intermarrying with whites; it required the total indoctrination of Indians into the system of white supremacy. This meant that Indians needed to adopt white sexual mores, including the aversion to race-mixing with blacks.

This Article calls this process—which operated as the pathway to Indian acceptance in American society and privileged Indians over blacks—“sexual assimilation.” While sexual assimilation was aimed at cultural genocide from the federal perspective, it paradoxically played a role in preventing Indian cultural extinction by helping to maintain tribal sovereignty.

Scholars have generally characterized Loving as a case about the line separating whites from blacks. Within the subtext of Loving, however, lies a narrative about the line separating Indians from blacks. Virginia’s miscegenation law employed a eugenics-based racial classification to legally construct Mildred Loving as “Negro,” but her true racial identity contained a Cherokee Indian component. Mildred was herself a product of race mixing. Furthermore, while Mildred’s mixed racial identity may lead one to believe that—as some scholars have suggested—Indians intermarried with blacks freely and frequently, the miscegenation laws of several tribes impart a counternarrative that portrays some Indian communities as viewing marriage to blacks as taboo.

Despite all of the discussion about miscegenation laws that Loving has generated, there has been little discussion about the American Indian Nations’s enactment of miscegenation laws. Perhaps this paucity of literature is due to the fact that Loving had no precedential effect in tribal miscegenation law since tribes are sovereigns that are, in many respects, independent of federal regulation. Nonetheless, an examination of Loving is incomplete without an examination of the role that state miscegenation laws played in Indian communities in the scheme to maintain the boundaries of racial categories and the struggle to maintain tribal sovereignty. An examination of tribal miscegenation law yields a better understanding of how state miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color such as Native Americans, who were often political casualties of state and federal laws designed with a black-white paradigm in mind. In fact, Native Americans found themselves wedged in the middle of the black-white models of racial subordination and ultimately adjusted to the existing racial hierarchy through social and legal assimilation.

The fact that several Indian tribes adopted miscegenation laws similar to the law struck down in Loving raises important questions. Why did these particular tribes adopt miscegenation laws? What role did the adoption of miscegenation laws play in the tribe and its interaction with state and federal governments? What role did tribal miscegenation laws play in the acculturation of Indians, and what legacy have these laws left for the tribes’ contemporary understanding of self?

This Article examines tribal miscegenation laws in an effort to locate some potential answers to these questions. This Article is not proffered as a definitive answer to the questions posed, but as a contribution to the emerging dialogue aimed at developing a collective understanding of the social, historical, and political context in which such laws arose and operated. This Article deviates from the traditional binary paradigm of exploring how miscegenation laws affected blacks and whites and explores how miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color and their relations with blacks. Thus, it reveals that the statute at issue in Loving and similar race-preserving laws indirectly regulated interracial relations between certain nonwhite groups.

Part II of this Article explores the substance of tribal miscegenation laws—and their legal and political context—in an effort to better understand why tribes adopted such racially isolating laws. Part III examines how state miscegenation laws affected Native Americans as well as the role of tribal miscegenation laws in maintaining individual and communal Indian identity and tribal sovereignty. Part IV questions whether tribal miscegenation laws, despite their repeal, help explain contemporary tribal conflicts between blacks and Indians. Part V concludes that extant legal disputes between the tribes and African Americans who claim membership in those tribes are derivatives of the project of sexual assimilation of Indian people. This suggests that both the tribes and African Americans who claim a Native American identity could benefit from a better understanding of the historical sociolegal context in which contemporary notions of Indian identity are rooted…

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‘The offspring of infidelity’: Polygenesis and the defense of slavery

Emory University
2008
506 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3332327
ISBN: 9780549849544

Christopher Luse, Instructional Assistant Professor of History
University of Mississippi

This dissertation examines an internal debate within the antebellum South over the nature of slavery and race. Focusing on the printed materials of the public sphere, this work explores the impact of a newly popular doctrine within ethnology, polygenesis, on the southern defense of slavery. Supporters of polygenesis claimed that non-white races were not merely inferior, but separately created species with fundamentally different physiological, intellectual and moral natures. For centuries polygenesis had been over shadowed by the orthodox doctrine in ethnology, monogenesis, which claimed that all races descended from a common ancestor (Adam and Eve). Under attack from antislavery forces, white southerners turned to polygenesis. They asserted that only the permanent inferiority of blacks justified bondage. Southern physicians were at the forefront of popularizing this defense, using their knowledge of medicine and physiology to claim that blacks resembled apes more than Caucasians. Southern newspaper editors took up the cause to refute abolitionist attacks. Supporters developed the theory of “hybridity,” claiming that people of mixed racial ancestry were “hybrids” doomed to disease, infertility and an early death. Southern supporters used this theory to assert only slavery prevented “amalgamation.” In response, southern Christians heatedly attacked this new “infidelity” as undermining the Bible, the chief defense of slavery. Southern ministers defended their vision of “Christian Slavery.” They claimed that southern slavery was based on a beneficial paternalistic master-slave relationship. Polygenesis undermined the common bonds of humanity necessary for paternalism. Southern Christians used the latest scientific research to argue for a common physical and moral nature among all the races. With the coming of the Civil War, southern Christians attempted to reform slavery up to “Bible Standards” by legalizing slave marriages and access to the Bible. They failed. In the aftermath of defeat, many white Christians adopted polygenesis to attack Reconstruction and racial equality.

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Proslavery Ethnology
• Chapter 2: Hybridity and Other Threats
• Chapter 3: Christian Slavery
• Chapter 4: The Moral and Theological Critique
• Chapter 5: The Scientific Critique of Polygenesis
• Chapter 6: I he Crisis of Christian Slavery
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

On the eve of the secession of South Carolina, Reverend James Henley Thornwell held southern slaveholders to Scriptural standards and found them wanting. Thornwell, a reluctant secessionist, delivered a jeremiad to call on southerners to repent as they faced the fiery trial of preserving their embattled slaveholding community. The Presbyterian Thornwell, a prestigious clergyman often called “the Calhoun of the Church,” denounced a grave threat to slavery. The target of his wrath was not only the ravings of abolitionists, but the “science, falsely so-called” which defended slavery by making “the slave a different being from his master.” Thornwell maintained “those who defend slavery upon the plea that the African is not of the same stock with ourselves, are aiming a fatal blow at the institution by bringing it into conflict with the dearest doctrines of the Gospel.” Thornwell viewed with consternation the increasing popularity of polygenesis, a previously marginal theory within ethnology. This emerging school not only asserted the inferiority of “lower races,” but claimed their separate creation as species with fundamentally different natures. Within the antebellum South a paradoxical debate raged. Southern white Christians, staunch defenders of slavery, attacked this new form of scientific racism by defending the humanity of black slaves. The southern critics of polygenesis even employed many of the same arguments and sources as abolitionists. Thornwell aimed his harshest anathemas at southerners who adopted this “infidel” theory to defend slavery. Thornwell admitted that “our offense has been, that in some instances we have accepted and converted into a plea, the conclusions of this vain conceit.”

In his brilliant sermon Thornwell managed to address the most important themes of the controversy. He argued “such speculations have not sprung from slavery. They were not invented to justify it. They are the offspring of infidelity, a part of the process by which science has been endeavoring to convict Christianity of falsehood.” Thornwell was only partially correct. Polygenesis, and scientific racism as a whole, had multiple roots. The debate involved not only slavery, but the long process of accommodation and conflict between science and religion within Western culture. It did not pit enlightened scientists against obscurantist religious bigots, although the polygenists loved to claim as much. Foes of polygenesis like Thornwell defended an established vision of the relation of science to religion that proclaimed the unity between the Word and Works of the Creator. The troubled but vital partnership between Christianity and science underwent profound strain due to the use of ethnology to defend slavery and racial subordination. Because, with apologies to Thornwell, it is clear that the necessity to defend slavery and racial subordination drove the development of polygenesis, which also became very popular in the North and Europe. The Northern Democratic Party, especially, used polygenesis to denounced calls for racial equality.

I propose to resurrect and analyze a half-forgotten debate which illustrates major issues in antebellum intellectual and cultural life. I contend that the controversy was much more prominent in the sectional turmoil than has been generally appreciated. The issue was fiercely contested in the pulpit, the lecture platform, in newspaper editorials and on the political stage. The debate was not the mere hobby-horse of a small group of researchers confined to erudite scientific journals. Its prominence is reflected in both secular and denominational newspapers. I have sought the most popular sources available. In part, this explosion of material was due to significant innovations in print technology and transportation during the era. The late antebellum era witnessed a massive increase in the circulation of newspapers and reading material. I have assembled this weight of material to demonstrate that the controversy was pervasive in the public realm. Newspaper editorials often assumed the basic points of the issue to be public knowledge. The conflict affected a host of pressing issues, from slavery to the rise of new scientific disciplines to the nature of republican government. The debate pervaded the public sphere.

The debate illuminates southern slavery and southern culture as a whole. Historians continue to debate heatedly the nature of slavery. The controversy over polygenesis uncovers a uniquely conservative, patriarchal and religious worldview as well as a serious indigenous challenge to this Christian, paternalistic ideology. The antebellum South increasingly denounced the powerful currents of egalitarianism, religious liberalism, and “infidelity” sweeping the western world, but they could not separate themselves from them. Southerners saw themselves as modern men participating in the larger developments of Western civilization. They used the latest innovations in sociology, political science and natural history to defend an institution denounced as immoral and archaic by the rest of the Western world…

…Along with abolitionism and socialism, proslavery Christians wrestled with another “ism,” racism. At the heart of the ethnological debates was the nature of race. In order to understand the antebellum controversy it is necessary to deal with some of the theoretical issues of race. Nineteenth century ethnologists celebrated their increased understanding of human differences as a major advance in understanding the natural world. They believed that they discovered the nature of human variations in the same fashion that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of physics. They believed they had gained insight into the plans of the Creator. “Race” was an expression of natural law, not an artificial human category. In contrast, for the past eighty years, biologists, anthropologists and geneticists have been dismantling the idea of race as a valid scientific concept. In a fascinating instance of foreshadowing, antebellum critics of polygenesis anticipated a number of the modern assaults on race. Opponents repeatedly pointed out the impossibility of clearly defining racial boundaries. They presented the imperceptible gradations of complexion, hair and physiognomy among the races. Proslavery Christians even denied that there existed a uniform, degraded “Negro Type.” Modern geneticists have mapped the extraordinary amount of genetic overlap between the various “races,” concluding that on the most basic level of chromosomes and genes, the races are the same. As Audrey Smedley puts it, the “Biogenetic variations in the human species are not the same phenomenon as the social clusters we call ‘races.'” Modern scientists have largely abandoned race in favor of geographically based “breeding populations” with varying gene frequencies.

Modern anthropologists have traveled a similar path. Beginning in the early twentieth century with the pioneering work of Franz Boas, anthropologists have stressed the plastic nature of human behavior and capacities. Anthropologists view human behavior as mostly culturally determined and transmitted. For the purposes of this study, the most crucial insight is that race is socially and culturally constructed. Race is an ideology, not a science. Barbara J. Fields writes “Race is not an element of biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually), nor even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pie) that can be imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.” Racial thought is inseparable from the purposes it serves within a specific society, the conflicts it attempts to resolve (or disguise), the hierarchies it justifies and the meanings it explains. The ideology of race is the descriptive vocabulary of the everyday reality of power relations, more specifically, of the historic ability of European peoples to dominate other peoples. Ideologies of race are always historic despite their focus on the natural world. Most scholars insist that “race” did not exist in anything like its modern form until the era of European discovery and expansion. Race was the product of unique historical developments despite the efforts of ethnologists to give permanency to racial categories. Like all ideologies, although not “real” in a scientific sense, race is the cultural expression of very real social relations. Race is a human invention in much the same sense as political systems, art or literature. And like all human creations, it changes according to the needs of its society.

The seductive power of race as an ideology rests in its explanatory power and its simplicity. Racial ideologies empower all members of the superior social caste to make immediate judgments on the worthiness and intelligence of the “lower races” which determine the allotting of power and privileges. Almost as important is its ability to comprehensively explain the world. This power underscores a contention of this project: that polygenesis represented the first comprehensive racial ideology. This new doctrine explained all of human history and culture in terms of permanent, inherent racial traits. Earlier theories on the origin and nature of races focused narrowly on how physiological distinctions originated. They attempted to explain how peoples seemed to differ. Early ethnologists sought explanations for human variations that preserved the idea of a common human origin. In contrast, polygenists placed race at the center of human history. They focused on why humans differed.

The late emergence of polygenesis as a prominent theory underscores one aspect of racism. Race as a concept did not emerge through scientific research or historical investigation, but through the experience of domination and exploitation. For centuries prior to the emergence of sophisticated racial theories, “folk racist” beliefs of the inferiority of other races were prevalent in America. Most of the scientific findings of polygenists justified long standing beliefs concerning Indians and Africans. In Colonial America, whites contended that only Africans could labor in the semi-tropical South and that mulattoes were weaker and more diseased than the pure races. Nineteenth-century ethnologists gave a veneer of  authority to these beliefs by expounding theories of “hybridity” and “acclimation.” Racial ideologies are nothing if not purposeful. They almost always address a pressing need, whether it is the need to justify the necessity of enslaved labor to grow staple crops, or the necessity to control a dangerous “middle caste” between black slaves and white freemen.

By the late antebellum era, “folk racist” beliefs solidified into a set of core contentions concerning “lower races.” This increasing sophistication underscores the dynamic and fluid nature of racist beliefs. As slavery came under increasing attack, basic assumptions concerning blacks could no longer be taken for granted. They required increasing support and evidence. Among the most important “principles” of scientific racism were that races represented permanent distinctions which could be measured and evaluated. These distinctions organized themselves in a hierarchy of racial “types.” “Types” were idealized representations which disguised all the innumerable complexities among actual peoples. In antebellum racial types, all Caucasians possessed the profile of a Grecian god, while all blacks were ape-like and prognathous. These types expressed the true nature of the distinct races. These types represented not merely physiological differences, but basic moral, spiritual and intellectual distinctions. Racists emphasized that surface somatic variations were merely signs indicating the more fundamental racial “essences.” White seeming quardoons were in a deep physiological and psychological sense still black or an unnatural mixture. Ethnologists contended that these fundamental distinctions reflected God’s will embodied in natural law…

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Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America

Ebony Magazine
October 1962
pages 94-104
(Digitized by Google)

Lerone Bennett, Jr., Executive Editor

The material in this chapter on miscegenation during the slavery period is based largely on James Hugo Johnston’s doctorial dissertation at the University of Chicago, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860; Carter Woodson’s article. “The Beginnings of The Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks” in The Journal of Negro History; and A. W. Calhoun’s study, A Social History of the American Family.

Sin. Sex. Race.

The three words took deep roots, intertwined and became one in the Puritan psyche. In the famous sermon preached at Whitechapel in 1609 for Virginia-bound planters and adventurers, the minister fused the words in a stern admonition against miscegenation. From Genesis he summoned the figure of Abram who left his country and his father’s house and migrated to a land God had prepared for his seed.

“Abram’s posteritie,” the preacher said, “(must) keepe to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised…  …The breaking of this rule, may breake the necke of all good successe of this voyage, whereas by keeping the feare of God, the planters in shorte time, by the blessing of God, may grow into a nation formidable to all the enemies of Christ.”

It was easier said than done.

From the beginning, English colonists, following Abram’s example, married and mated with Hagars—red and black. Even more distressing to the Puritan mind was the broad tolerance of the English women who married and mated with Hagars brothers. Proscription began early. In 1630, a bare 21 years after the Whitechapel sermon, one Hugh Davis was “soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro…” Forty years later, white women were being whipped and sold into slavery and extended servitude for showing open preferences for Negro men. Alarmed by widespread miscegenation, colonists from South Carolina to Massachusetts began a systematic campaign which ultimately made the Whitechapel sermon the racial policy of the land. Every instrument of persuasion was used to teach white people that they should “not marry nor give in marriage” to Negroes. No amount of persuasion, however, could “keepe” whites to themselves.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

In and around Jamestown and the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, there was an extensive trade in genes. Socio-economic conditions in the early colonies encouraged racial mingling. White men and women from England, Ireland and Scotland were bought and sold in the same markets with Negroes and bequeathed in the same wills. As indentured servants bound out for five or seven years, these whites worked in the fields with Negro servants and lived in the same rude tenant huts. A deep bond of sympathy developed between the Negro and white indentured servants who formed the bulk of the early population. They fraternized during off-duty hours and consoled themselves with the same strong rum. And in and out of wedlock, they sired a numerous mulatto brood.

When Negro servants were reduced to slavery, the colonial governing classes redoubled their efforts to stamp out racial mixing. Miscegenation in this era was not only a breach of Puritan morality, but it was also a threat to slavery and the stability of the servile labor force. As early as 1664, Maryland enacted the first anti-amalgamation statute. It was an astonishing document. The statute was aimed at white women who had resisted every effort to inoculate them with the virus of racial pride; and the preamble stated very clearly the reasons which drove white men to the extremity of enslaving white women.

And forasmuch as divers freeborn English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves, by which also divers suits may arise, touching the issue of such women, and a great damage doth befall the master of such negroes, for preservation whereof for deterring such freehom women from such shameful matches, be it enacted: That whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave, from and after the last day of the present assembly, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issues of such free-born women, so married, shall be slaves as their fathers were.

This law failed to stay intermarriage. Some women chose love and slavery; others were reduced to slavery by scheming planters who forced them to marry Negro men in order to reap the additional economic benefits accruing from the extended service of the mothers and the perpetual slavery of their children. A celebrated case revolved around Irish Nell, an indentured servant who came over with Lord Baltimore. When Baltimore returned to England, he sold Irish Nell to a planter who forced or encouraged her to marry a Negro. Shocked by the practice of prostituting white women for economic purposes. Lord Baltimore used his influence to get the law changed. The new law was about as effective as the old one—which is to say, it was not effective at all. E. I. McConnac, the authority on white servitude in Maryland, said: “Mingling of the races in Maryland continued during the eighteenth century, in spite of all laws against it.”

Negro-white marriages, especially Negro male-white female marriages, were a problem in Virginia and other colonies. In 1691, Virginia restricted intermarriage. Similar laws were put on the books in Massachusetts in 1705, North Carolina in 1715. South Carolina in 1717. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia’s ban on intermarriage, Ann Wall was convicted of “keeping company with a Negro under pretense of marriage.” The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall for five years and bound out her two mulatto children for 31 years, and “it is further ordered,” the court said, “that ye said Ann Wall after she is free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into this county she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes.”

In an unsuccessful attempt to halt intermingling, Pennsylvania banned intermarriage in 1725. Forty-five years later, during the glow of the Revolution, Pennsylvania repealed the ban on intermarriage. Thereafter, mixed marriages became common in Pennsylvania. Thomas Branagan visited Philadelphia in 1805 and averred that he had never seen so much intermingling. “There are,” he wrote, “many, very many blacks who… begin to feel themselves consequential… …will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances… I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the southern states)… …There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them at present.”

Aristocrats did not always obey the rules they made. Benjamin Franklin, it is said, was quite open in his relationships with black women. Carter Woodson, the careful historian, says Franklin “seems to have made no secret of his associations with Negro women,” Well-to-do people usually stopped short of legal marriage, but there is evidence that some threw caution to the wind. The following item appears in the will of John Fenwick, the Lord Proprietor of New Jersey. “Item, I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye leaste part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against him, me her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking ye Black ye hath been ye ruin of her; and becoming penitent of her sins; upon ye condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her.”…

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Toward a Racial Abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume 38, Issue 3, (Summer 2002)
pages 259–283
DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10063

Michael G. Kenny, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

The Pioneer Fund was created in 1937 “to conduct or aid in conducting study and research into problems of heredity and eugenics.. and problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States.” The Fund was endowed by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a New England textile heir, and perpetuates his legacy through an active program of grants, some of the more controversial in aid of research on racial group differences. Those presently associated with the Fund maintain that it has made a substantial contribution to the behavioral and social sciences, but insider accounts of Pioneer’s history oversimplify its past and smooth over its more tendentious elements. This article examines the social context and intellectual background to Pioneer’s origins, with a focus on Col. Draper himself, his concerns about racial degeneration, and his relation to the eugenics movement. In conclusion, it evaluates the official history of the fund.

This article traces the historical roots of The Pioneer Fund, a still extant American charitable endowment founded in 1937 by textile heir Col. Wickliffe Preston Draper (1890–1972). The Fund, through its granting program, claims to have had a significant positive influence on the development of the behavioral sciences; but it has also attracted public attention because of its support for research on racial group differences. Pioneer’s beginnings reach back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when eugenics emerged as a powerful and cosmopolitan social reform impulse; an exploration of the Fund’s origins sheds light both on that time and on the permutations of the eugenics movement that led to its present notoriety.

However, knowledge of Pioneer’s beginnings and social context remains fragmentary and dispersed, and here I use the papers of the American Eugenics Society (in the keeping of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), and the Harry Laughlin papers (Library of Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri) to gain entrée into the circumstances surrounding the prehistory and early days of the Fund, particularly the attitudes and role of its founder, Wickliffe Draper.

Those circumstances have been smoothed over by figures central to the Fund’s current operation and, in conclusion, I will evaluate this revisionist history in light of the archival and supplemental material to be reviewed below…

…Davenport and Grant, among others, held that certain racial combinations—say Negro/White—are inherently “disharmonious” because the evolutionary histories of their aboriginal populations had gone down widely divergent paths. As Davenport put it, “miscegenation commonly spells disharmony—disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment. A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people” (1917, p. 366). Madison Grant feared that, if the American “Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” it will sweep the “nation toward a racial abyss” because miscegenation always leads to a evolutionary reversion toward the lower type in the mix. “The cross between a white man and a negro is a negro… the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (1916, p. 228; for more on racial “disharmony” see Barkan, 1992, p. 165; Baur, Fischer, & Lenz, 1931, p. 692; Glass, 1986, p. 132; Provine, 1973; Stepan, 1985; Tucker, 1994, pp. 64–67).

The investigation of race mixing from a Mendelian point of vieww as pioneered by German anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who—armed with Davenport’s early studies of human heredity—undertook an innovative field study of “die Rehobother Bastards,” a Boer/Hottentot mixed-race population in the then German colony of South-West Africa (Fischer, 1913; see Massin, 1996). Fischer’s general aim was to decouple the effects of heredity and environment through detailed biometric and genealogical studies of a discrete and nowrelatively endogamous population of mixed race origins (Massin, 1996, pp. 122–123). The “Bastards” had the advantage of being an isolated group with well known family ties, unlike the situation in the United States, in which persons of mixed-race ancestry had been “subsumed in a lower, completely undefinable mixed-race proletariat” (1913, p. 21). As late as 1939, Fischer’s monograph was still regarded as the “classic study of race mixture” (Hooton, 1939, p. 156)…

…By definition a “white” person could have no known trace of nonwhite blood (including Asian), whereas a nonwhite person was anyone who did—except when it came to those who were one-sixteenth native Indian or less, and were therefore defined as equivalent to whites in legal terms. This logic was based on a perception of just who most of the contemporary “Indians” of Virginia actually were. Plecker believed that, because of long standing miscegenation between the two communities, most of those who identified themselves as “Indian” were in effect negroes attempting to pass as white (Plecker, 1924).

Though not arising out of any particular love for Indians, the one-sixteenth rule had an interesting motivation: so as to not exclude from the white race the many proud descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Disputes about racial identity, legitimacy, and validity of marriage generated by such legislation have provided considerable subsequent diversion for legal historians (Avins 1966; Pascoe 1996; Saks 1988; Wallenstein 1998).

Plecker had already corresponded with Charles Davenport about the quality of white/Indian/black mixed-race populations, and was included among those whom Wickliffe Draper should meet. Plecker and Cox accordingly traveled north in June to visit with Draper in New York; they also stopped by to see Madison Grant, and were feted by the Laughlins at Cold Spring Harbor. Cox gave a talk at the Museum of Natural History on the topic of repatriation, and there was further discussion of a possible Virginia-based endowment to advance the cause of eugenics (Plecker to Laughlin, 8 June 1936; see Smith, 1993, pp. 80–81).

What Draper envisioned was nothing less than the establishment of an Institute of National Eugenics (or perhaps “Institute of Applied Eugenics”) at the University of Virginia, aimed at “conservation of the best racial stocks in the country” and “preventing increase of certain of the lower stocks and unassimilable races.” Laughlin observed that the University “has a tradition of American aristocracy which the nation treasures very highly.” It therefore seemed a promising venue, as did the South in general—“because of its historical background and traditional racial attitude”—ready to assume leadership in defense of the American racial stock (Laughlin to Draper, draft letter; 18 March 1936). In his survey of the American racial makeup, Madison Grant found that “with Virginia one reaches the region where the old native American holds his ground” (Grant, 1934, p. 226)…

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Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work In the Arts, Ahumanities and Social Theories
Number 31 (2000)
98 paragraphs

Stephanie Athey, Associate Professor of English
Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts

Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells

 This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism—black and white—in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the base of feminist work.

A central tenet of twentieth-century feminisms, the concept of female sovereignty–women’s economic, political, sexual and reproductive autonomy–was first defined, debated and justified through eugenic and imperialist discourse at the turn of the last century. Black and white feminist discourse of the period made the politically enfranchised, legally protected body both the goal and token of full citizenship. However, within the frameworks white women elaborated, the economic, political, sexual, and reproductive autonomy of black and white women were set fundamentally at odds.

… Even when the organized societies of the American eugenics movement came to focus exclusively on “better breeding” as the only lasting means of race improvement, many black and white women’s organizations retained euthenic projects of regenerative reform well into the twentieth century, promoting the eugenic benefits of social hygiene, temperance reform, training in domestic science, and the like. The eugenic interests of both Frances Willard and Victoria Woodhull, for instance, combine race-driven reproductive agendas with other regenerative environmental reforms.

Black men and club women shared these interests as well. African American artists and intellectuals promoted black race purity as a means of conserving “our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals.” In the face of white racial theories, these race conservationists promoted the positive value of blackness. Black nationalists like DuBois, T. Thomas Fortune, Alexander Crummell, stressed different dangers related to race mixing, ranging from loss of black culture and consciousness to a biological “loss of vitality” or “vitiation of race characteristics and tendencies.” Other prominent African Americans supported a eugenics of race mixing or “amalgamation” as a means of genetic improvement. Proponents like Charles Chesnutt or Pauline Hopkins imagined a new American line that blended the strengths of a multiracial heritage but ultimately “conform[ed] closely to the white type.” All these groups reinforced color-based distinctions, and like white eugenists, these African Americans also measured racial fitness in terms of bourgeois class and gender conventions.

Kevin Gaines has argued that though the elite male voice of race conservation publicly defended elite black women against accusations of unchastity, they also frequently reinforced white racist slander, presuming lower-class and rural women’s complicity in systemic sexual abuse. Certainly, racist and sexist theories of black female degeneracy were powerfully resisted by black women’s groups. Yet white supremacist hereditarian and nativist premises were absorbed by black women’s organizations as well. For instance, leaders of the African American, Boston-based Women’s Era Club fought against lynching and racial segregation while maintaining elitist and nativist positions on working class culture and “foreigners,” and an attendant interest in “social hygiene.” As black women refashioned the white codes of bourgeois womanhood into black feminist resistance, their “politics of respectability” was fused to a civilizationist uplift ideology; this for some made it compatible with eugenic discourses of degeneracy. For instance, Nannie Burroughs weighs euthenic against eugenic strategies in her discussion of black poverty in Washington. While the “student of euthenics,” she says, “believes that the shortest cut to health is by creating a clean environment… to do a work that will abide we must first “get the alley’ out of the seventeen thousand Negroes.”…

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A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (2011)
Article 16
27 pages

Carole Lynn Stewart, Assistant Professor of English
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

And when the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutionaries, that shall have ended in that victory.

—Abraham Lincoln, “An Address Delivered before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society”

In the mid‐nineteenth century, temperance movements throughout Britain and the United States strove for universalist and international goals of individual sovereignty, restraint, and enlightened freedom. As with many international movements of civil societies emerging from the formation of modern states, they expressed themselves in strongly nationalistic forms of identity. American temperance movements often assumed many of the middle‐class, domestic, and individualistic values associated with the Protestant work ethic and its inner‐worldly asceticism. Temperance in general became prominent in the United States in the period that corresponded with the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, though examples of temperance organizations predate this surge of social movements in the revivalistic atmosphere. American temperance movements were simultaneously concerned with defining the purity of self and establishing a coherent national identity. The notion and practice of temperance has also been a salient orientation of many religions; however, in the colonial period, not even the New England Puritans were temperance activists. On the one hand, the birth of American temperance seemed to initially appear as a result of the nationalist revolutionary ethos, expressing the desire for widespread civil societies: “temperate” behavior suggested a type of rational, restrained, and public character. On the other hand, temperance movements acquired an evangelical character in the context of the affected and enthusiastic social spaces of “awakening.”

The opening epigraph from Abraham Lincoln captures the contiguity between concepts of slavery and intemperance, as well as the exceptionalist ethos prominent in the United States and brought to bear on issues of individual freedom of the “land.” Indeed, many temperance groups were nativist and virulently racist even when temperance was linked to antislavery. Notably, beyond popular goals of moderation, total abstinence, and prohibition, temperance also expressed different promises and civil ideals for many African American abolitionists who conjoined temperance and antislavery. For the former enslaved, temperance seemed to promote and encompass national values like the Protestant work ethic, self‐reliance, and individual restraint, particularly for the poor and those who were striving for social elevation by inculcating the values of the middle class…

…The word “civilization” does not grow out of American democracy and its revolutionary founding, but rather from modern European imperialism and its emerging structures of civil society. The word is particularly Eurocentric and was not in frequent use until the eighteenth century, first in France and then in England. Historian of religions Charles H. Long observed in his paper “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem” that “the meaning of this term cannot be understood apart from the geographies and cultures of the New World that are both ‘other’ and empirical.” While an empirical other—recognized negatively as an enslaved person—Brown consistently wrote of such figures as the “tragic mulatta” and the predicament of one‐drop racism in the United States, with positive views of the eventual “amalgamation” of the “races.” Moreover, discussions of Brown’s work commonly allude to the self‐consciously constructed aspects of his identity—from the lack of a fixed identity, his biracial, nearly outwardly “white” identity that made it possible to almost pass, to Brown’s multiple roles in actual life and his writing. These roles begin with his name William as a child on the plantation being changed to Sandford because another white child had the same name, and his eventual renaming as William Wells Brown. The name was “bestowed upon” him from the Quaker, Wells Brown, who helped him escape. From that fluid and uncertain position, he assumed various vocational and activist roles as a steamboat operator, a barber, a banker, a husband and father, a gentleman among the ladies, a radical abolitionist and republican revolutionary, an anglophile, a temperance activist, a consummate man of letters, a historian, a playwright, a novelist, and, in the 1870s, a medical doctor of uncertain qualifications.

This intermixture of roles and identities also disrupted the familiar binary of primitive/civilized. Brown conceived of the inherently Eurocentric concept of civilization in creolized ways—living an intermixture that opposed the opposition of terms. Indeed, rather than necessarily leading to the situation of the empirical other, what some have understood as Brown’s liminal “trickster” identity could be viewed as a restrained orientation characterizing a basic revolutionary structure out of which Brown saw a modern civilization emerging. This notion of civilization not only came to fruition through Brown’s European travels (1849–1854) and direct reflections on the harbingers of “civilization,” but through his postbellum reflections on African civilizations and his pilgrimage for “home” to establish a dignified relation to the land in My Southern Home (1880). In Brown’s travels, temperance remained the locus for a new, creolized civilization, expressing a manner and style of behavior that resembles a sociogenetic and psychogenetic meaning of restraint forged in light of the history of transatlantic slavery and an imagined revolutionary founding, as well as countering the excesses inherent in modern “civilized” exchanged…

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Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre

PopMatters
2011-04-08

Matt Mazur, PopMatters Contributing Editor

Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing—a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)…

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INDIGO – Laura Kina & Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 North Miami Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
2011-05-14 through 2011-06-30

Opening Reception
2011-05-14, 14:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

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

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

In the 19th century, Bengal was the world’s biggest producer of indigo but today, the deep blue color of indigo is synthetically created in a lab and is associated in the West with blue jeans more than its torrid colonial past. But indigo holds a sustained presence in the post-colonial identity of India. Employing fair trade embroidery artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Jyoti and Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges. The artists decided to collaborate in 2008-2009, considering their mutual interest in textile history, pattern & decoration. They began by thinking about the intersections of their own ethnic and national positions in relation to fabrics. For this exhibition in particular, Jyoti’s Indigo Narratives utilize traditional embroidery and embellishments along with heritage symbols belonging to traveling ethnic communities who settled in coastal Gujarat while Kina’s Devon Avenue Sampler series focuses on a contemporary Desi/Jewish community in Chicago.  This exhibition includes new works in mediums such as hand-embroidery on khadi, acrylic on fabric, hand-stenciled Sanskrit calligraphy and textile embroidery on canvas.

For more information, click here.