Mixed Race Studies

Shades of White

The New York Times
2011-02-25

Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London
and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Racial passing is one of America’s deeply hidden traditions, a largely unacknowledged and unstudied aspect of national life. Historically, African-Americans with identifiably dark skin have had only two choices when confronting racial discrimination and oppression: either they could try to ease their burden through accommodation, making the best of a bad situation, or they could engage in protest and active resistance. The situation was often quite different, however, for light-skinned African-Americans of mixed parentage. For them, there was a tempting third option of trying to pass as white.

In an illuminating and aptly titled book, “The Invisible Line,” Daniel J. Sharfstein demonstrates that African-Americans of mixed ancestry have been crossing the boundaries of color and racial identity since the early colonial era. An associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University and an author with a literary flair, Sharfstein documents this persistent racial fluidity by painstakingly reconstructing the history of three families. In a dizzying array of alternating chapters, he presents the personal and racial stories of the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls. The result is an astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights…

Read the entire review here.

Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebears

The Boston Globe
2011-02-20

Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Randall Lee Gibson, an urbane, Yale-educated Confederate general, mocked black people as “the most degraded of all races of men.’’ Later, as a US senator from Louisiana, he helped broker the end of Reconstruction, freeing the South to harass and lynch blacks virtually at will.

In the 20th century, his orphaned son, Preston, was raised by an aunt and her husband, who had been a justice on the US Supreme Court that legitimated racial segregation in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a rent-a-car employee and genealogy buff dubbed himself Sir Thomas Murphy after tracing his mother’s lineage to English aristocracy. His father’s line remained a mystery.

None of these white people knew that they had African-American ancestors who had “passed for white.’’

Race has always been an inherently unstable construct of nature, culture, and law. Should one be considered black if one grandparent or great-grandparent was black? Or does the “one-drop’’ rule hold, that a single black forebear makes one black? Does “race’’ exist in the eye of the beholder, or solely in the mind of the beheld. In today’s age of mixed-race chic—in which Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter are hailed as beautiful royalty—such questions may seem quaint. But throughout American history, the consequences have been deadly.

“The Invisible Line,’’ Daniel J. Sharfstein’s spellbinding chronicle of racial passing in America, reminds us that the phenomenon has existed since our Colonial beginnings—as escape from oppression, enhancement in status, and path to economic opportunity. However well defined in law, the racial line has always remained porous, breachable under the right conditions…

Read the entire review here.

Sister Act
 
Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online
2011-03-02

Topher Forhecz, Staff Writer

Montgomery College and Doorway Arts Ensemble presents the sisterly story ‘Tether’

When Julie Taiwo Oni wrote the play “Tether,” she did so not only to examine her relationship with her twin sister Jessica Kehinde Ngo, but also to answer a recurring question.

“My whole life everyone’s like ‘What’s it like to be a twin?'” Oni says. “I wanted to write a play about it.”

Co-Produced by Doorway Arts Ensemble and Montgomery College’s Arts Alive Theatre Series, “Tether” premiered at the Studio Theater in the Cultural Art Center at Montgomery College on Feb. 18 and runs through March 13. Set on a tetherball court during the 1990s, “Tether” tells the story of biracial teenage twins Lach (played by Gwen Grastorf) and Lam (Jade Wheeler) as they learn about religion, boys and race. Although they are similar in many ways, Lach’s skin is white and Lam’s is black. Oni gave the twins different skin colors after reading an article on the condition…

Read the entire article here.

Doorway Arts Ensemble and Arts Alive Theatre present: “Tether”

Doorway Arts Ensemble
February 2011

Emily Morrison, Publicist
Office: 703-892-0801

sex, race, religion, tether ball… twin sisters are coming of age [2011-02-18 through 2011-03-13]

Bethesda, Maryland Doorway Arts Ensemble presents Tether, a World Premier play by Julie Taiwo Oni, co-produced with Arts Alive Theatre Artistic Director, Perry Schwartz as part of Montgomery College Silver Spring Arts Alive Theatre Series. This production marks the first presentation by a professional theater organization of a script that received development and a stage reading as part of the 2009 Inkwell’s Inkubator Festival in Washington, DC.

In Tether, Lach and Lam are 15 year old mixed race twins. Lach is white, Lam is black and both are obsessed with tether-ball. In this rhythmic drama, life is a back-and-forth game of rules and regulations, kissing boys, movie-talk and the roots of their religious upbringing. As the sisters come into their maturity and men enter the game, they must learn to tether without their counterpart. When an obstacle swings between them, they must begin to face and embrace the differences between each other in order to be true to themselves

The odds against of a couple having twins of dramatically different color are a million to one, each twin fertilized by different sperm with different genetic input from their parents. The phenomenon is extremely rare… there are only about 5 sets of mixed race twins living in the world today.

Runs February 18 through March 13, 2011.
Performances: Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sunday Matinee at 2pm
Monday, March 7 at 8 PM – Special Performance

Friday Feb 18 – Press Night – followed by reception (press are welcome to all performances)
Saturday Feb 19 – Q&A follows performance featuring the dramaturg, director, playwright and actors

TICKETS: $10 for general admission/$7 for students and seniors/$5 for MC Students, Faculty and Staff. Call 240-567-5775 or order online at www.tickets.com. All performances opening weekend are Pay What You Can.

LOCATION: The Studio Theater in the Cultural Art Center at Montgomery College Silver Spring 7995 Georgia Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20910 [map & directions]…

For more information, click here.

Honoring Our Legacy: Past, Present and Future, RED/BLACK Connections

Indian Voices
October 2010
pages 8-9

Black Native American Association’s First Multi-Cultural National Pow Wow
California State University Eastbay-Hayward
September 18-19, 2010

On Friday, September 17, a workshop examined the Red/Black relationships and how to improve them. Noted participants on the panel included Black Seminole Lonnie Harrington, author of “Both Sides of the Water”, a teaching artist at the Arts Connections in New York and a Native American drummer. Others were Dr. Andrew Jolivette, Associate Professor and department chief of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and author of two books: ”Louisiana Creoles” and “Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity;” Dr. Elnora Webb-Mitchell, President of Laney College; Pastor Steve Constantine, Arwak Tribe, Guyna, South America; and Jewelle Gomez, poet, author, political activist, playwright, Native American (Wampanoag and Iowasy) and Director of Cultural Equity Grants Program of San Francisco…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons

Duke University Press
1996
198 pages
Cloth: ISBN: 978-0-8223-1826-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2044-9

Jane Lazarre

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.

Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.

With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.

Estelusti Marginality: A Qualitative Examination of the Black Seminole

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 4 (June 2008)
pages 60-80

Ray Von Robertson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas

Approximately four years ago, I began collecting interview data with Black Seminoles/Estelusti in Oklahoma. My research focused on how the Black Seminoles negotiated their marginal status within the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and with nonfreedman Blacks. Using Weisberger’s (1992) marginality construct, I found that the Estelusti most often employed ‘poise’ to manage their state of ‘double ambivalence’. This study further explored the issue of Black Seminole marginality after their reintegration into the cultural group in 2003. My findings, while different in specifics, were generally consistent with those found a few years earlier. The Black Seminoles still appear to experience significant marginality and are not fully accepted by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

Read the entire article here.

Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (review)

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 41, Number 4, Spring 2011
pages 661-663
E-ISSN: 1530-9169, Print ISSN: 0022-1953

Mary Niall Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New Orleans University

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009. 400 pages, Hardcover ISBN: 9780674023512.

The people who inhabit the pages of this book—New Orleans’s nineteenth-century Creoles of color—make difficult, yet fascinating, subjects of historical and cultural study. They are difficult for two reasons: (1) Their story, which is complicated and unfamiliar to most readers, requires Thompson to explain the precarious yet prosperous existence of a group of French-speaking free people of color, with ties to Europe and the Caribbean, in the midst of a U.S. slave society; (2) although most were well educated, and many of them were writers and intellectuals, few of their personal papers are stored in archives (most of those that have survived remain in private hands). Scholars, therefore, must look to a variety of sources to piece together the history of Creoles of color. In the book under review, this array of documentation includes legal and property records, Romantic poetry, newspaper editorials, and evidence of the built environment. To address such disparate sources, Thompson wields a number of methodological tools, from theories of urban space to literary criticism, historiography, and legal analysis.

The fundamental problem that frames this book, according to the…

Read or purchase the review here.

Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Ashgate Publishing
July 2007
218 pages
219 x 153 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-5189-5

Edited by

Nora E. Jaffary, Associate Professor of History
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women’s experiences in colonialism in North and South America.

Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women’s relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context.

This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the New World Nora E. Jaffary
• Part 1: Frontiers
  • 2. Women as go-betweens? Patterns in 16th-century Brazil Alida C. Metcalf
  • 3. Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on new Spain’s imperial frontier Bruce A. Erickson
  • 4. The very sinews of a new Colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women, 1732–52 Ben Marsh
• Part 2: Female Religious
  • 5. The convent as missionary in 17th-century France Susan Broomhall
  • 6. ‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla Joan C. Bristol
  • 7. Andean women in religion: Beatas, ‘decency’, and the defense of honour in colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns
• Part 3: Race Mixing
  • 8. Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico Nora E. Jaffary
  • 9. ‘An empire founded on libertinage’: The mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue
    Yvonne Fabella
  • 10. Mediating Mackinac: métis women’s cultural persistence in the Upper Great Lakes Bethany Fleming
• Part 4: Networks
  • 11. Circuits of knowledge among women in early-17th-century Lima Nancy E. van Deusen
  • 12. Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme Linda M. Rupert
• Afterword
  • Women in the Atlantic world
  • Patricia Seed
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 1 (February 2011)
pages 33-68
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Jana K. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History
Tulane University

During the 1980s, U.S. politicians and the media presented Vietnamese Amerasians as quintessential Americans who could be brought home rather than as foreigners or as immigrants. However, Amerasians were non-white immigrants and their rights to enter the United States intertwined with debates over immigration restriction and the ongoing search for American Prisoners of War. The popular emphasis on Amerasians’ American “look” resulted in a discourse which valued whiteness, and sometimes blackness, at the expense of Vietnamese mothers and Asian identities. This article argues how Amerasian immigration policies re-inscribed hierarchies of race and sexuality grounded in the history of Asian exclusion.

Read or purchase the article here.