Mixed Race Studies

Brooklyn Museum Acquires 18th Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Colonial Elite

artdaily.org: The First Art Newspaper on the Net
2011-01-18

Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

BROOKLYN, NY.—The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730-1796) painting Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, (circa 1764-96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles. [The painting will go on view 2001-03-07.]

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documents colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses…

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Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color

Duke Law Journal
Volume 49, Number 6 (April 2000)
pages 1487-1557

Trina Jones, Professor of Law
Duke University

Because antidiscrimination efforts have focused primarily on race, courts have largely ignored discrimination within racial classifications on the basis of skin color. In this Article, Professor Jones brings light to this area by examining the historical and contemporary significance of skin color in the United States. She argues that discrimination based on skin color, or colorism, is a present reality and predicts that this form of discrimination will assume increasing significance in the future as current understandings of race and racial classifications disintegrate. She maintains that the legal system must develop a firm understanding of colorism in order for the quest for equality of opportunity to succeed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• I. DISTINGUISHING RACE AND SKIN COLOR
  • II. COLOR DISTINCTIONS THROUGH THE LENS OF TIME
  • A. Before the Civil War: 1607-1861
  • B. After the Civil War: 1865-2000
  • C. The Social Psychology of Contemporary Black-White Colorism
• III. COLOR IN CONTEMPORARY LAW
  • A. Statutory Support for Color Claims
  • B. Substantive Content of Color Claims
  • C. Race, Color, Mixed Racial Identity and Employment Discrimination Law
  • D. Colorism and the Quest for Equality of Opportunity
• CONCLUSION
• FOOTNOTES

INTRODUCTION

On the Saturday evening following my mother’s recent marriage, old friends and new gathered at a local restaurant to celebrate the occasion. While standing in the buffet line, I turned to introduce my new step-niece, Aaliyah (age 4), to the son of a family friend, LaShaun (age 5). Immediately following the introduction, LaShaun, who is clearly outgoing and charismatic, looked up at me with the innocent honesty of a child and said, “I know another Aaliyah at my school, but she’s brown.”

The first thing LaShaun, whose skin is a rich Michael Jordan chocolate, noticed about Aaliyah was her light golden brown skin. LaShaun did not create or invent these differences. Without deliberate or conscious design, his statement merely reflects the fact that he operates in a social context where people learn early on that color is significant. Although some people may claim that color differences [*pg 1489] within racial groups are without meaning and that people do not notice or care about fine differences in skin pigmentation, the observations of a five-year-old child belie these statements. And so does history.

This Article examines the prejudicial treatment of individuals falling within the same racial group on the basis of skin color in the context of antidiscrimination law. In a 1982 essay, Alice Walker called this prejudicial treatment “colorism.” Although this terminology appears to be relatively new, colorism is not a recent invention. In the United States, this form of discrimination dates back at least as far as the colonial era. Yet, notwithstanding its long existence, colorism is often overshadowed by, or subsumed within, racism. As a result, courts are either unaware of the practice or tend to minimize its importance.  This state of affairs is unfortunate because, as I demonstrate in this Article, color differences are still frequently used as a basis for discrimination independently of racial categorization.

The analysis proceeds in three parts. Part I distinguishes colorism from racism. Because the ultimate result of race-mixing was the creation of tone or hue variations within racial groups, Part II explores the history of miscegenation in this country in order to demonstrate how society has used skin color to demarcate lines between racial groups and to determine the relative position and treatment of individuals within racial categories. This history illuminates contemporary discrimination on the basis of color. Part III examines the judicial response to contemporary claims based on color and explains why courts can and should permit color claims in the context of antidiscrimination law. Part III also investigates the suggestion that racial classification may become increasingly difficult in the future as the acceptability of the one-drop rule declines and as race-mixing increases. Assuming that there is merit to this suggestion, Part III probes whether legal recognition of claims based upon skin color will provide suitable redress for discrimination against persons who are neither visibly White nor visibly Black.

My hope is that this Article will assist in the development of a more nuanced understanding of the intricate ways in which people discriminate in this country. More specifically, by engaging in this investigation, I seek to prevent the law from becoming a source of injustice by showing how progress towards equality of opportunity may be overstated if colorism is ignored. Briefly, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, employers have hired increasing numbers of Blacks into positions not previously available to them. The increasing number of Blacks in these positions suggests racial progress. Studies show, however, that Blacks in positions of prominence and authority tend to be lighter-skinned. Thus, some employers may be hiring only a subset of the Black population, a subset selected, in part, based on skin color. Because some Blacks are being denied access to employment opportunities due to colorism, the appearance of progress is more limited than we might assume. Legal recognition of color claims is one way to begin redressing this situation.

It is important to note that the analysis contained herein focuses on color dynamics among Black Americans. Although some scholars have criticized the tendency to analyze racial issues in terms of a Black/White dichotomy, I have chosen to concentrate on the Black community in order to limit the magnitude of this project without sacrificing its utility. In addition, this focus allows me to probe more directly the peculiar symbolism of black and white as colors. This symbolism suggests that although colorism is an important element of racism, it is equally its own distinct phenomenon. Finally, although I do not wish to endorse the reduction of race relations to a Black/White paradigm, I have chosen to focus on the dynamics of the racial group with which I am most familiar. I recognize that similar issues concerning skin color exist within Native American, Asian-American, and Latino communities, and believe that issues peculiar to those communities merit detailed study. Although such analysis is beyond the scope of this initial project, I hope this Article will nonetheless be of assistance to scholars in future investigations involving questions specific to other racial groups…

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The Hapa Project: How multiracial identity crosses oceans

UH Today
University of Hawai`i
Spring 2007

Alana Folen and Tina Ng

Hawai`i—often overlooked as nothing more than a scenic paradise—recently started to live up to its “melting pot” reputation when a U.S. senator representing Illinois formally announced his presidential candidacy. With personal ties to Hawai`i, Sen. Barack Obama inadvertently put Hawai`i in the spotlight.   

It was his physical appearance that separated Obama from his competitors. Obama is hapa. His father was black and from Kenya; his mother was white and from Kansas. His unique look brought attention to the hapa population in Hawai`i.

Although the growing population of hapa people is beginning to get recognized, their experiences in Hawai`i and the continental United States vary from each individual. The cultural implications of having multiple identities have surfaced and more hapa people have needed to defend who and what they are…

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Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law (Anderson review)

The Catholic Historical Review
Volume 97, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 179-180
E-ISSN: 1534-0708, Print ISSN: 0008-8080

R. Bentley Anderson, S. J. Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies
Fordham University

In Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law, Fay Botham, adjunct professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa, focuses on a rarely examined issue in American race matters: the intersection of religion, law, and interracial marriage. To what extent did Protestant or Catholic understanding of marriage influence secular law regarding this institution? In particular, how did the Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament and the Protestant notion that marriage was sacred but a state matter influence judicial decision making? Furthermore, what are the proper roles of the church and state in establishing marriage laws in this country?

Divided into six chapters, Almighty God begins with an examination of the 1948 California-based case Perez v. Lippold, which outlawed religious discrimination in marriage. The deciding vote in the state of California’s Supreme Court decision was cast by a Christian Science jurist who agreed with the…

Read or purchase the review here.

Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race

The New York TImes
2008-03-31

Mireya Navarro

Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.

“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.

“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. “I remember feeling like, Isn’t this what everybody expects me to think?”

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own.

They recalled the friends, as in Ms. Bratter’s case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, “What are you?” Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.

“I think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront,” said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College in Washington, who identifies herself as African-American, American Indian and white.

“Maybe we’ll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race,” Ms. John said. “The guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person’s racial appearance.”

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.

“There’s this notion that there’s an authentic race and you must fit it,” said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. “We’re confronted with the lack of fit.”…

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Race Passing and American Individualism

University of Massachusetts Press
February 2003
176 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand)

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture

In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for white embody a paradox. By virtue of the “one drop” rule that long governed the nation’s race relations, they are legally black. Yet the color of their skin makes them visibly-and therefore socially-white.

In this book, Kathleen Pfeiffer explores the implications of this dilemma by analyzing its treatment in the fiction of six writers: William Dean Howells, Frances E. W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Although passing for white has sometimes been viewed as an expression of racial self-hatred or disloyalty, Pfeiffer argues that the literary evidence is much more ambiguous than that. Rather than indicating a denial of “blackness” or co-optation by the dominant white culture, passing can be viewed as a form of self-determination consistent with American individualism. In their desire to manipulate personal identity in order to achieve social acceptance and upward mobility, light-skinned blacks who pass for white are no different than those Americans who reinvent themselves in terms of class, religion, or family history.

In Pfeiffer’s view, to see race passing as a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of individualism is to invite richer and more complex readings of a broad range of literary texts. More than that, it represents a challenge to the segregationist logic of the “one drop” rule and, as such, subverts the ideology of racial essentialism.

New NAACP Leader Looks Ahead

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2008-05-20

Michel Martin, Host

Benjamin Jealous is the new president of the NAACP. Jealous, a former news executive and lifelong human rights activist, discusses his new post and the ever-changing role of the NAACP in the civil rights movement.

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I’m Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. In a moment, the Mocha Moms on going green as a family. They’ll talk about ways to get started. And things never to say to Asian-American colleagues. We start our series on how to be mindful of the sensibilities of others in our increasingly diverse workplaces.

But first, one of the country’s oldest civil rights organizations gets a new leader. The NAACP chose a new president on Saturday, 35-year-old human rights activists Benjamin Todd Jealous. He will be the youngest president ever in the history of the 99-year-old civil rights organization. His election comes after the organization tries to recover from a period of internal strife to engage a new generation of members and to refocus its mission. Ben Jealous joins us now to talk about his new post and hopefully a little bit about himself. Welcome to the program. Congratulations.

Mr. BEN JEALOUS (President, NAACP): Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: You’ve had a couple of days to take it all in. Can you describe what it means to lead this historic organization founded by giants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells Barnett.

Mr. JEALOUS: Those two are a big deal to me. I come out of the black press, that’s how I learned how to do what I did for Amnesty [International], and so it’s extremely humbling. You know, at the same time, as a parent of a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl, I’m extremely impatient and want to focus on the now, you know, want to focus on the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline and on making sure that this great association is as important in the 21st century as it was in the last century…

…MARTIN: Your profile is a bit different from past leaders in a number of respects—I mean, the fact that you are not a minister or a politician. One other interesting thing about you is that you are also biracial, as is Barak Obama, as is the lieutenant Governor [Anthony G. Brown] of Maryland, as is the mayor [Adrian Fenty] of Washington.

Mr. JEALOUS: Can I, can I make a small correction there?

MARTIN: Of course.

Mr. JEALOUS: I’m black. You know, the only thing that we have, you know, the only definition that’s out there on the books, if you will, are state laws, and my family is from Virginia. When I was born it said, the law said that you had to be 1/32nd, excuse me, if you were at least 1/32nd of African descent, you were black, end of story. White was an exclusive definition, black was an inclusive definition. I do have biracial parentage but quite frankly…

MARTIN: You don’t consider yourself biracial.

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean, I don’t understand it, I mean the… my grandmother’s much fairer than I am, has straight hair. You know, the reality is that, you know, our family, like most families were sort of created in the Jeffersonian model. You know, we were raped on Virginia plantations, and you know, all of those kids were black.

MARTIN: But your parents weren’t? I mean, that’s not your parents.

Mr. JEALOUS: Yeah, right but what I’m saying is that…

MARTIN: What I’m curious about though is that, is there something, is there an important cultural moment here, or not?

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean you know, yeah it is significant, I think the most significant thing about my parents is that you know, a year after their marriage was illegal, it was made legal because of the work of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund.

You know, my parents—when they were married in Washington, D.C., in 1966, they had to be married there because they couldn’t get married where they lived in Baltimore. When they drove back for the party in Baltimore, people pulled off the side of the road, took off their hat because they thought it was a funeral procession passing, because there was a Cadillac in front of a bunch of cars with their lights on.

So, you know, and my father was disowned not by his two brothers or his mom, but by the entire rest of his family. And his family was in Salem in 1636, and they’re a big family. And they disowned him, not because they didn’t believe that he loved my mom. You know, his great uncle, I mean my great uncle drove out, sat down with them, said we believe that you love this woman, but you know I’m a man, I know a man can love many women, and you need to fall out of love quick or you’re going to be out of this family.

So, you know, the notion biracial I just think is blunt and crude and ahistorical, and to say biracial parentage, of course. I completely, you know, I’ve done more research on my father’s history, I think, on all the white cousins that I’m in touch with, and the ones who didn’t disown us were much in touch with, I love very much, if you know somebody named Jealous it’s probably one of them…

Read the entire transcript here.  Listen to the episode here (00:17:13).

He’s Black, Get Over It

The American Prospect
2008-12-05

Adam Serwer

We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a provocatively titled op-ed for The Washington Post last Sunday, Marie Arana declared that President-elect Barack Obama is “not black” because he’s also “half white.” Arana argues, using a naïve and idealized evaluation of how race operates in Latin America, that identifying Barack Obama as black is “racist,” and “racially backward,” and pleads with the reader to stop “using labels that validate the separation of races.”

If identifying biracial people as black “validates the separation of the races” then there is perhaps no one contributing more to the cause of these neo-segregationists than Barack Obama himself. “My view has always been that I’m African-American,” Obama told Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Turner Trice back in 2004. “African Americans by definition, we’re a hybrid people.” In seeking a validation of her own ideas about race and racial identity, and by casting Obama as the victim of a reductive racial vocabulary, Arenas simply ignores the will of her subject. But racial categories are only unjust insofar as they prevent people from identifying how they wish. Arenas is doing exactly what she is attempting to prevent, forcing Obama into the racial category of her, rather than his own, choosing.

Part of the problem with the American conversation on race is the bizarre license that people take when writing about it on the basis of their own biography. But being “biracial” does not make one an expert on race, or on racial hybridity, any more than being a Republican or a Democrat makes one an expert on politics. So much of the writing on Obama’s racial identity, or on his political impact is muddled by our own subconscious racial desires. We want Obama to mean something specific, either to us or to others, with little regard for how he actually sees himself. As it stands, Arenas seems ill-prepared to talk about how biraciality operates in the African-American context. The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds. Originally, this was a consequence of racial oppression; racist laws that determined that anyone with black ancestry was black. We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

He’s Not Black

The Washington Post
2008-11-30
 
Marie Arana

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

Pennsylvania State University
December 2006
285 pages
AAT: 3343682
ISBN: 9780549992738

Khadidiatou Gueye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
  • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
  • Introduction
  • Black/White Polarization
  • Racial Hybridity
  • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
• Chapter Two
  • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
  • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
  • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
• Chapter Three
  • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
  • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
• Chapter Four
  • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
  • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
  • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter Five
  • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
  • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
  • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.