Mixed Race Studies

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
2004
248 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 1578066670 (9781578066674)
Paper ISBN: 9781604732481

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

An examination of race and audience in an American innovator’s writings

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt’s novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt’s lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience.

Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience.

Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt’s career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt’s views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt’s unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America’s most significant writers on the subject.

Between boxes

the Burr
Kent State University
Fall 2005
pages 50-55

Story by Jessica Rothschuh
Photo illustration by Clarissa Westmeyer
Photos by Lauren Arendt

For some multiracial students, college becomes a time to discover their heritages and shape their identities

HER DARK HAIR IS PULLED BACK IN BRAIDS, LEAVING HER FACE OPEN, TWO large, dark eyes peering out from long eyelashes. Her skin is a warm almond color. Her ethnicity is hard to put a finger on. She could pass as Hispanic or Native American.

Jalayna Nadal, freshman Latin American studies major from Edinboro, Pa., is both. Her father is black and Cherokee, and her mother is Puerto Rican and white.

Developing her multicultural identity has been a lifelong process for Nadal, and college is a time to further explore her multiple heritages, shaping her cultural identity as she learns more about herself and her roots.

For biracial and multiracial students like Nadal, college may prove both exciting and difficult. Mixed-race students in particular can experience an intense desire to discover their heritages and create their racial identities, but they also can feel pressure to define themselves. For the first time, students are searching for identities outside the environment in which they were raised, without the constant support of family…

…College is another step away from his culture, Isaacs says. “Because I’m not around my father as much, I don’t assert my Hawaiian identity as much.” Here, he hasn’t found a place he really fits in, and when he returns to Hawaii, it is hard to feel he still belongs there, either. “You’re just stuck in limbo,” Isaacs says. “You have to be kind of like a cultural chameleon in a sense.” Isaacs says he adapts his identity to those around him, and it is easy for him to blend in because he looks white.

For some biracial students, however, being a chameleon is hard. “The problem that they face saying, ‘I am biracial,’ is other people saying, ‘No, you’ve got to choose,’ ” says Angela Neal-Barnett, associate professor and research psychologist. “With biracial adolescents, you get two things happening: They choose to identify with one race or they choose to develop a biracial identity.”

For more than five years, Neal-Barnett has been studying the phenomenon of “white acting” in minority adolescents. Through her research, she has talked with biracial youth, most of whom are primarily black and white. “One’s skin color can run the gamut, and one’s hair color and texture can run the gamut. You have students who look white, but their racial identity is black or biracial,” she says. In fact, the biracial adolescents Neal-Barnett has spoken with almost always choose to identify as black or biracial. Very few identify as white…

Read the entire article here.

World Premiere of “Family Portrait in Black and White” at 2011 Sundance Film Festival

Family Portrait in Black and White
2011
Interfilm Productions, Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Directed by: Julia Ivanova
Producted by Boris Ivanov

OLGA NENYA is a foster mother to SIXTEEN BLACK ORPHANS in Ukraine—where 99.9% of the population is white and where race DOES matter. Forced to constantly defend themselves from racist neighbors and skinheads, these children have to be on guard against the world that surrounds them.

No one is related by blood in this family, but everyone is connected by the color of their skin and by the woman who chose to be their foster mother. Olga is a loving mother but she is not Mother Teresa; she bears much more resemblance to a platoon leader. Some kids have learned to manipulate her, some obey, and only one constantly battles with her. Kiril, a 16-year-old boy nicknamed ‘Mr. President’ for his intelligence and effortless aristocracy, is the one who dares to openly argue with Olga—and pays dearly for it. The modern world is interconnected: not only did the British Charity buy the house for the family, but these kids from a tiny place in Ukraine have been spending summers with host families in France and Italy year after year. When European families offer to adopt the kids, Olga refuses despite being aware of what awaits a black Ukrainian beyond the protective shield of her family. For her, these children already have a family and, as she says, “The bird should only have one nest”. This film is a multi-dimensional portrait of one family, the country they live in, and the bigger world they are a part of.

For more information, click here.

2010-12-01
Park City, Utah

PARK CITY, UT – Sundance Institute announced today the lineup of films selected to screen in the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In addition to the four Competition Categories, the Festival presents films in six out-of-competition sections to be announced on December 2. The 2011 Sundance Film Festival runs January 20-30 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. The complete list of films is available at www.sundance.org/festival…

…World Cinema Documentary Competition

This year’s 12 films were selected from 796 international documentary submissions.

Family Portrait in Black and White / Canada (Director: Julia Ivanova) – In a small Ukrainian town, Olga Nenya, raises 16 black orphans amidst a population of Slavic blue-eyed blondes. Their stories expose the harsh realities of growing up as a bi-racial child in Eastern Europe. World Premiere

American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression

Purdue University
2004
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3166693
ISBN: 9780542022999

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjust Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography. This dissertation suggests that these mixed race literary texts, as well as the multiracial experiences, sensibilities, themes, and expressions communicated therein, differ from traditional conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race in American society, history, and literature that are based on the logic of the binary racial system. Mixed race literature attempts to phrase and communicate suppressed, distorted, and/or neglected multiracial experiences, sensibilities, and possibilities. Mixed race literature is also coextensive with the emergence of the multiracial social formation and movement in the post-civil rights era. “Precursors” to mixed race literature fall short in their attempt to phrase and to communicate complexities and experiences of mixed race lived existence. I read Jean Toomer’s Cane as one of the most significant precursors to mixed race literature in American literature. Mixed race literature also differs from “mixed race in American literature” insofar as the later, in the presentation of mixed race characters and themes, both relies on and validates the categorical, hierarchical, and dichotomous logic of the binary racial system. Notable examples in the canon of American and American Ethnic literature are William Faulkner and Toni Morrison who, from a mixed race perspective, extend and promote in their texts the suppression and distortion of multiracial complexities, possibilities, and lived realities in the service of the binary racial system.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Chapter One: Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era: A Personal Narrative Essay
  • The Summer of 1999
  • Growing up Racially Mixed in the 1970s and 1980s
  • Negotiating Raciated University in the 1990s
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two: Cane and Jean Toomer: Percursors, American Mixed Race Literature
• Chapter Three: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia: A Novel About Growing Up Racially Mixed and Becoming Multiracial in the Post-Civil Rights Era
• Chapter Four: American Mixed Race Ficiational Autobiographies: Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets
• List of References
• Vita

Purchase the dissertation here.

Biracial Youth and Families in Therapy: Issues and Interventions

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Volume 26, Issue 3 (July 2000)
pages 305–315
DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2000.tb00300.x

Stephanie Milan, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Connecticut

Margaret K. Keiley, Professor Director of Clinical Research
Center for Children, Youth, and Families
Auburn University

Empirical research and clinical resources focusing specifically on minority youth and families have increased tremendously in the last 2 decades. Despite this trend, certain groups continue to be relatively neglected. In particular, very few resources exist for understanding the unique challenges that often face biracial youth and their families. In this article, we use a nationally representative database to compare functioning in biracial youth to white adolescents and other minority adolescents. Results suggest that biracial/biethnic youth are a particularly vulnerable group in terms of self-reported delinquency, school problems, internalizing symptoms, and self-regard. As a group, they are also more likely to receive some form of psychological intervention. Given these findings and the shortcoming of clinical resources for work with this population, we provide an in-depth discussion of why biracial youth may be particularly vulnerable from a social-constructionist framework and offer several strategies based on narrative family therapy for working with biracial youngsters and their families.

Read or purchase the article here.

Characterizing the Admixed African Ancestry of African Americans

Genome Biology
Volume 10, Issue 12 (2009)
R141
DOI: 10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141

Fouad Zakharia
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine

Analabha Basu
Institute for Human Genetics
University of California, San Francisco

Devin Absher
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

Themistocles L. Assimes
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Alan S. Go
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Mark A. Hlatky
Department of Health, Research and Policy
Stanford University School of Medicine

Carlos Iribarren
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Joshua W. Knowles
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Jun Li
Department of Human Genetics
University of Michigan

Balasubramanian Narasimhan
Department of Health, Research and Policy
Stanford University School of Medicine

Steven Sidney
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Audrey Southwick
Department of Infectious Diseases
Stanford University School of Medicine

Richard M. Myers
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

Thomas Quertermous
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Neil Risch
Institute for Human Genetics
University of California, San Francisco

Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of California, San Francisco

Hua Tang
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine

Background: Accurate, high-throughput genotyping allows the fine characterization of genetic ancestry. Here we applied recently developed statistical and computational techniques to the question of African ancestry in African Americans by using data on more than 450,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped in 94 Africans of diverse geographic origins included in the HGDP, as well as 136 African Americans and 38 European Americans participating in the Atherosclerotic Disease Vascular Function and Genetic Epidemiology (ADVANCE) study. To focus on African ancestry, we reduced the data to include only those genotypes in each African American determined statistically to be African in origin.

Results: From cluster analysis, we found that all the African Americans are admixed in their African components of ancestry, with the majority contributions being from West and West-Central Africa, and only modest variation in these African-ancestry proportions among individuals. Furthermore, by principal components analysis, we found little evidence of genetic structure within the African component of ancestry in African Americans.

Conclusions: These results are consistent with historic mating patterns among African Americans that are largely uncorrelated to African ancestral origins, and they cast doubt on the general utility of mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers alone to delineate the full African ancestry of African Americans. Our results also indicate that the genetic architecture of African Americans is distinct from that of Africans, and that the greatest source of potential genetic stratification bias in case-control studies of African Americans derives from the proportion of European ancestry.

…Although much attention has been paid in the genetics literature to the continental admixture underlying the genetic makeup of African Americans, less attention has been paid to the within-continental contribution to African Americans, in particular from the continent of Africa. Studies have focused primarily on the matrilineally inherited mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) and patrilineally inherited Y chromosome. These two DNA sources have gained wide prominence owing, in part, to their use by ancestry-testing companies to identify the regional and ethnic origins of their subscribers. Yet these two sources provide a very narrow perspective in delineating only two of possibly thousands of ancestral lineages in an individual.

The majority of African Americans derive their African ancestry from the approximately 500,000 to 650,000 Africans that were forcibly brought to British North America as slaves during the Middle Passage. These individuals were deported primarily from various geographic regions of Western Africa, ranging from Senegal to Nigeria to Angola. Thus, it has been estimated that the majority of African Americans derive ancestry from these geographic regions, although more central and eastern locations also have contributed.  Recent studies of African and African-American mtDNA haplotypes and autosomal microsatellite markers also confirmed a broad range of Western Africa as the likely roots of most African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Cross ’12, Castagno ’12 Participate in Mixed Race Conference

The Wesleyan Connecton
Welyean University’s Newsletter
2010-12-02

Olivia Drake

Rachel Cross ’12 and Alicia Castagno ’12 participated as panel members in a session of the Critical Mixed Race Conference sponsored by dePaul University in Chicago Nov. 5-6 [2010].

The conference was attended by academicians and students (primarily graduate students) from across the country. Cross and Castagno co-taught a Wesleyan student forum on mixed race last year and were on a panel discussing the development and teaching of this topic as students. In the question and answer period someone asked how many student-taught classes on mixed race there were in the country. A member of the University of Washington group said that as far as they could find out, only the UW and Wesleyan had student-taught classes…

Read the entire article here.

Destabilizing Racial Classifications Based on Insights Gleaned from Trademark Law

California Law Review
Volume 84, Number 4 (July, 1996)
pages 887-952

Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Perre Bowen Professor of Law; Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Law
University of Virginia

Analogy to trademark law offers solutions to the problematic binary system of race classification in the US by exposing and deconstructing the notion of whiteness as a property right. Maintaining the racial dichotomy between blacks and whites preserves whiteness as the position of privilege and blackness as the marginalized other. Promotion of multi-racial categories would make racial identification generic and would destroy the value of marking as a way of protecting the property right of being white. Ethnic identities could be retained because of the benefits of voluntary identification.

“What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 39, Number 1 (Fall, 2006)
pages 33-53

Erica Abrams Locklear, Assistant Professor of Literature & Language
University of North Carolina, Asheville

In his introduction to the 1985 collection of essays entitled “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates rightfully asserts: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Even so, contemporary disputes centered on race remain one of American most glaring problems. Although laws supporting atrocities such as the Jim Crow South rest in the past, the systems of classification that inspired them still operate on many different levels of present-day American society, ranging from the way people describe themselves, to the labels people place on difference, to the way the American government decides what fraction of “blood” constitutes race. Fiction writer Josephine Humphreys explores the complexities, falsifications, and implications of racial classification for the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina in her historically based novel Nowhere Else on Earth. First published in 2000, the work’s 2001 Penguin edition includes a readers guide following the text in which Humphreys explains her impetus for writing about the Lumbee people. She admits that when she first encountered a Lumbee aboard a train, upon discovering ihat the woman was not white, Humphreys asked, “What are you?”, She goes on to remember that the young woman explained the story of the Lumbee people, as well as the infamous tale…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 710–719
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00350

Lynwood Montell
Western Kentucky University

The ninety year history of a racial isolate in the Kentucky–Tennessee border is examined. Peopled by a mixed population of Whites, Blacks, and, occasionally, Indians, the community received notoriety as an enclave for fugitives from the law of neighboring jurisdictions. Its demise came in 1958 as a result of changing land use and increasing tensions between the residents and those of the environing White society.

It has been said that the American Negro has in his veins not the blood of one race alone, or of two, but of three (Porter 1932: 287); the reference, of course, being to the Indian and White races. Such was certainly the case with the Coe Ridge racial island, comprising a people in southern Cumberland County, Kentucky, who called themselves Negro but who freely and proudly admitted to an early blood intermixture with the Cherokees of western North Carolina and a later infusion of White blood on multiple occasions on the Kentucky frontier. This racial group was concealed from the glare of the outside world in the raw yet beautiful hillcountry of southern Kentucky near the point where the Cumberland River disappears into Clay County, Tennessee, after meandering from Wolf Creek Dam across Russell, Cumberland, and Monroe Counties in Kentucky. It was here that the now legendary Black Coe bastion flourished, withered, and then perished before the relentless assault of the White man’s world.

Placed on Coe Ridge as a result of slave emancipation following the Civil War, the Coe racial island withstood for ninety years the attempts of resentful White neighbors to remove this single blot within an otherwise homogeneous White Society. The Black Coe people fought so fiercely in defense of their lives and property that, by the time the settlement finally succumbed to economic and legal pressures in the late 1950s, it was notorious in folk legend across the upper South as a place of refuge for White women shunned by their own families and communities and as a breeding ground for a race of rather handsome mulattoes, as a stronghold of moonshining and bootleggers, and as a battle ground for feuds that produced a harrowing list of ambushes, street murders, stabbings, and shootings. After years of raids, arrests, and skirmishes with federal agents and local lawmen, the Negroes’ resistance was broken, and they departed the hill country enclave for the industrial centers north of the Ohio River…

Read the entire article here.