Mixed Race Studies

“A Fascinating Interracial Experiment Station”: Remapping the Orient-Occident Divide in Hawai’i

American Studies
Volume 49, Number 3/4, Fall/Winter 2008
pages 87-109
E-ISSN: 2153-6856
Print ISSN: 0026-3079

Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies and History
Oberlin College

Rick Baldoz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
Oberlin College

Introduction

During the 1920s and 1930s, American intellectuals on the U.S. continent often described Hawai’i as a “racial frontier,” a meeting ground between East and West where “unorthodox” social relations between Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Caucasians had taken root. The frontier metaphor evoked two very different images, the “racial paradise” and the “racial nightmare,” and in both characterizations, Asians figured prominently. In 1930, of the islands’ civilian population of nearly 350,000, about 236,000 or 68 percent were classified as Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Korean.  Political, religious, and educational leaders in Hawai’i were the main propagators of the racial paradise image, which expressed optimism in the ability of Caucasians and Asians to live together, while also celebrating the presence of Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Native Hawaiians, and an array of mixed-race groups.  They touted the assimilative powers of American institutions and promoted Hawai’i as a model of colonial progress to audiences on the U.S. mainland. David Crawford, the president of the University of Hawai’i,  summarized this view during a 1929 visit to Los Angeles where he spoke before a group called the Advertising Club. Hawai’i society, explained Crawford, was “demonstrating the possibility of the meeting of Orient and Occident on terms of friendship that practically eliminate race prejudice.”

This celebration of interracial harmony and cultural assimilation contrasted with views advanced by West Coast nativists who portrayed Hawai’i and its preponderance of Asians in the population as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of American expansionism. During debates in the early 1920s over renewing the Alien Land Law in California, anti-Japanese agitators cited Hawai’i as a failed experiment where the color line had been irretrievably breached by a vanguard force of…

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Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2001
pages 30-43
E-ISSN: 1534-1461
Print ISSN: 0038-4291
DOI: 10.1353/slj.2001.0012

William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University

Writing fiction one hundred years ago, Charles W. Chesnutt believed that America’s racial future was best embodied in himself, a mixed-race American. A light-skinned mulatto living on the color line, he argued that racial amalgamation, through passing and miscegenation, would slowly erode the rigid white-black dichotomy of America’s caste system. Eventually, he foresaw, America would become one race, as his stories of light-skinned protagonists on the color line seemed to predict. Unfortunately for his literary reputation, this racial prescription for a New America was premature. By the time of his death in 1932, the Harlem Renaissance had celebrated a New Negro who was no light-skinned assimilationist, but one who, like Langston Hughes, stood on the racial mountaintop of a proud, culturally distinct, dark-skinned self. It is now a century after Chesnutt’s first book publications, and America is changing. Racial amalgamation, according to federal statistics, occurs at a more rapid pace than ever before. From 1970 to 1990, marriages between blacks and whites rose from two percent of all marriages to six percent. The number jumped to over twelve percent by 1993 (“With This Ring”). Nearly ten percent of black men marry white women..

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The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance Illustrations

American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography
Volume 15, Number 1, (2005)
pages 86-111
E-ISSN: 1548-4238
Print ISSN: 1054-7479
DOI: 10.1353/amp.2005.0006

Caroline Goeser, Assistant Professor of Art History
University of Houston

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University of Virginia

Ebony and Topaz was issued once in 1927 as a collection of essays, poetry, and illustrations edited by Charles S. Johnson, the African American editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Though the volume has received little scholarly attention, it articulated the theme of racial hybridity that not only proved an integral component of Harlem Renaissance cultural production but marked the diversity of American modernism between the wars. Significantly, Johnson’s editorial method in Ebony and Topaz, which promised minimal interference and direction, allowed his contributors freedom to broach controversial subjects shunned by the more conservative African American editors of the period, such as W. E. B. DuBois. As a result, Johnson’s compendium resisted limitation to the facile theme of racial uplift and challenged restrictive classifications of racial identity. The most culturally subversive production came from two illustrators of Ebony and Topaz, Charles Cullen and Richard Bruce Nugent. Seemingly benign at first glance, their illustrations interrogated the…

[View some of Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork here.]

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Racial Choice at Century’s End in Contemporary African American Literature

University of Maryland
2008
161 pages

Kaylen Danielle Tucker

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008

This dissertation introduces the term “racial choice” to describe a contemporary idea that racial identity can be chosen or elected, as can the significance and the influence of race on an individual’s identity. Racial choice emerges out of the shifting historical, cultural, and social discussions of race and identity we have witnessed after integration. This dissertation examines the resulting representations of contemporary black identity in African American literature by analyzing texts that were published in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that feature protagonists that come of age during or after integration. Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) are representative texts that engage racial choice to register how the racial hierarchy has changed in the late twentieth century and how that change affects the African American literary tradition of race writing. In their attempts to write outside of the existing racial paradigm—using white flight, passing, and satire as narrative strategies—the authors test the racial boundaries of African American literature, finding that writing outside of race is ultimately unachievable.

The introductory chapter explains the cultural, literary, and scholarly context of my study, arguing that because race matters differently in the late twentieth century contemporary African American literature handles race uniquely. I argue in my first chapter that Lee uses white flight as a narrative form to move Sarah Phillips beyond the influence of racialization and to suggest class as an alibi for racial difference. Continuing this theme amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and the multiracial project of the 1990s, my second chapter analyzes Senna’s Caucasia, which revises the passing narrative form and explores the viability of choosing a biracial identity. In my third chapter, I show how Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle satirizes the African American protest tradition to point up the performativity necessary in maintaining racial binaries and suggests that culture is a more accurate identifier than race.

My concluding chapter argues that though the three novels under study challenge racial categories—and by extension race writing—to different degrees, they all use similar methods to point up the shifting significance of race, racial categories, and racial identity. By historicizing attitudes about racial categories, challenging the dichotomous understanding of race, representing the tensions of racial authenticity, and showing the performativity necessary to maintain racial categories, the novels illustrate the traditional boundaries of racial choice and attempt to stretch the limits of the African American literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Future American: The “Color Line” and “Racial Choice” at the Millennium
• Chapter One: Integration and White Flight in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips
• Chapter Two: Racial Choice and the Contemporary Passing Paradigm
• Chapter Three: Satire, Performance, and Race in The White Boy Shuffle
• Conclusion: The Future of Racial Identity and African American Literature
• Works Cited

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Rethinking race and politics: Mixed race and the trajectory of minority politics in the United States

University of California, Irvine
2007
232 pages
AAT 3274346
ISBN: 9780549148944

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

This project addresses how minority communities frame collective identities and organize political agendas amidst growing levels of racial and ethnic diversity. Using the rise of a politicized Mixed Race identity as a case study, I examine how Asian American, Black, Latino and White Americans choose to exert their racial group identities as a response to the Mixed Race public policy agenda. Using a multi-method research design consisting of survey data and qualitative interviews with leaders of minority non-profit advocacy organizations, I examine how identity group politics functions at two levels: First, at the elite level, how do Mixed Race and traditional minority group activists frame their right to political representation? Second, at the mass level, how do each of these racial groups utilize these identities in their evaluation of various political issues? I find that Mixed Race Americans, regardless of their political efforts to gain recognition for their distinctive racial identities, have adopted a political agenda and individual political attitudes which corresponds with the civil rights agenda advanced by the traditional minority groups.

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…One might argue that discrimination against multiracial people is merely a subset—perhaps even a milder one—of discrimination against monoracial individuals. In other words, a person who is identified as partially Black might be subject to the same kind of animus as one who is identified as fully Black. This Part aims to disprove that notion and demonstrate that animus against people identified as multiracial is a unique phenomenon.

I readily acknowledge some overlap between what we might call monoracial and multiracial animus: a racist who dislikes people who she views as Asian might well dislike an individual whom she identifies as part-Asian for some of the same reasons. But viewing someone as part-Asian also lends itself to unique forms of animus not directed at those perceived as monoracial. A mixed-race person may be viewed as polluted, defective, confusing or confused, passing, threatening, or—in our diversity-obsessed society—as opportunistic, gaining an advantage by identifying with a group in which he is at best a partial member. These negative associations may be distinguished from those directed at people perceived as monoracial.

I use history, sociology, and jurisprudence to buttress my claim that animus against multiracial people is a unique form of animus that is distinguishable from animus directed at any monoracial group. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that animus against racially mixed individuals is anything but benign or mild.

Other scholars have attempted to illuminate the reason underlying the persistent discomfort with racial mixing and racial mixedness. My own view is that different groups’ discomfort with mixing is so heterogeneous that any theory attempting to explain animus toward multiracial people will by necessity be quite complicated. While I believe that development of such a theory is an important project, it is one I do not address in this Article. Instead, I focus on demonstrating that racism directed at people who are viewed as multiracial is a real phenomenon that may result in tangible negative consequences to the lives of the people thus identified…

Nancy Leong, “Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination,” American University Law Review, Volume 59, Number 3 (2010): 483-484.

Quadroon Balls functioned as a form of entertainment but also served a meeting space for its participants to enter into plaçage/sexual relationships. It was at these dances that free young women of color, guided by their mothers, charmed their way into the hearts and pockets of Louisiana’s white males. At the balls, quadroon women “show their accomplishments in dancing and conversation to the white men.” Upon finding a quadroon to his liking, a man would negotiate with the quadroon woman’s mother. If both mother and daughter were satisfied with his financial and social ranking, she would be “placed” as his placée. According to literary traveler George William Featherstonhaugh,

When one of them [a quadroon] attracts the attention of an admirer, and he is desirous of forming a liaison with her, he makes a bargain with the mother, agrees to pay her a sum of money, perhaps 2000 dollars, or some sum in proportion to her merits, as a fund upon which she may retire when the liaison terminates. She is now called “une placée;” those of her caste who are her intimate friends give her fetes, and the lover prepares “un joli appartement meuble.”

 Each quadroon had a “value” which “depended on the attractiveness of the subject, the fairness of her complexion, and her mother’s ability to show her off against the competition.” This “value” was derived through negotiations between the quadroon’s mother and the white suitor. If an agreement was reached, the quadroon would become a concubine or placée for the white man in exchange for financial support for the woman. These exchanges frequently meant that the quadroon woman would receive housing, a sum of money, and promised financial support for any children that would come from these relationships. The “price” for a quadroon varied, but could be as much as $2,000. Often times, the quadroon woman would be set up in an apartment (“un joli appartement meuble”) located on Ramparts Street in New Orleans that was rented by the white gentleman for their use. These plaçage relationships could last for weeks, months, years, and, much less frequently, a life-time. In these exchanges, sexual exploitation by both parties is particularly noticeable; the quadroon exploited the pocketbook and the man exploited her body.

Quadroon women who participated in the balls had been groomed from early childhood by their mothers to take advantage of this unique opportunity to become the exploiters, using their bodies, beauty and assumed exotic sexuality to enter into contracts with wealthy white men. Monique Guillory discusses this exchange that gives women some power when she states, “Through this strategic commodification of the quadroon body, which I have called the commercial, women of color seized an opportunity beyond the confines of slavery to set the price for their own bodies.” These quadroon women chose to use their bodies as leverage to raise their own social status above the “negro” slave and the dark-skinned free people of color. This population of women became agents who exploited themselves and white men in an effort to transcend the racist system of antebellum Louisiana.

Noël Voltz, “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008).

Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America

Praeger Publishers
2003-06-30
160 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89789-558-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-313-05864-6

Obiagele Lake

The author explores how Africans in America internalized the negative images created of them by the European world, and how internalized racism has worked to fracture African American unity and thereby dilute inchoate efforts toward liberation. In the late 1960s, change began with the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan and new a consciousness, which went hand in hand with Black Power and pan-African movements. The author argues that for any people to succeed, they must first embrace their own identity, including physical characteristics. Naming, skin color, and hair have been topical issues in the African American community since the 18th century. These three areas are key to a sense of identity and self, and they were forcefully changed when Africans were taken out of Africa as slaves.

The author discusses how group and personal names, including racial epithets, have had far-reaching and deep-seated effects on African American self perception. Most of her attention, however, is focused on issues of physical appearance which reflect a greater or lesser degree of racial blending. She tells us about exclusive African American organizations such as The Blue Vein Society, in which membership was extended to African Americans whose skin color and hair texture tended toward those of European Americans, although wealthy dark-skinned people were also eligible. Much of the book details the lengths to which African American women have gone to lighten their complexions and straighten their hair. These endeavors started many years ago, and still continue, although today there is also a large number of women who are adamantly going natural. Her historical look at the cultural background to African American issues of hair and skin is the first monograph of its kind.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Renaming African People
• Mulattoes and Color Consciousness in the United States
• Hair and Color Consciousness in African America
• Hair and Skin Color in Africa and the Africa and the African Diaspora
• The Delinking of African Hair
• Appendix A: Mixed Race Names
• Appendix B: Percentage Selecting Traits Across Race Labels
• Appendix C: Names Used by African Americans in U.S. History
• Appendix D: African American Orginizations Bearing the term “African”
• Appendix E: Original Version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”
• Appendix F: Rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”
• Appendix G: “Yellow Rose of Texas” Marching Song
• Appendix H: Brown Fellowship Society Members, 1790-1869
• Appendix I: Brown Fellowship Society Slave Owners
• Appendix J: Facts About Hairdressing Innovations
• References Cited
• Index

Making sense of race and racial classification

Race and Society
Volume 4, Issue 2, (2001)
Pages 235-247
DOI: 10.1016/S1090-9524(03)00012-3

Angela D. James, Associate Professor of African American Studies
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

As social scientists, race scholars, and demographers, how do we begin to make sense of recent changes in the Census Bureau’s system of racial classification, as well as of the popular response to those changes? This paper explores the lacuna between popular and scientific understandings of race. It reviews the theoretical understanding of race as a social construct, providing a brief history of racial classification in the United States. In addition, it examines the concepts of race mixing and racial ambiguity as a function of the peculiar and distinctive construction of race in the United States. Finally, the essay critically assesses how race is currently used in social research and how race might be more accurately represented and effectively employed in that research.

Article Outline

1. Changing notions of race
2. Race as social construction
2.1. The origin of race
2.2. The nature of race
3. The U.S. Census and its use of race for classification
3.1. Race versus ethnicity in the Census
4. From ethnicity to race: contemporary racial construction and Hispanics
4.1. Mixed-race and racial stratification
4.2. The strange history of race in social science research
5. Conclusions
References

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Psychological Adjustment, Behavior and Health Problems in Multiracial Young Adults

University of Maryland, College Park
2006
236 pages

Warren L. Kelley

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006

This study: (1) examined whether multiracial young adults reported lower levels of well-being relative to their White and monoracial minority peers and whether these outcomes were moderated by college attendance or racial identification; and (2) investigated factors, drawn from Root’s (2003) ecological model of multiracial identity development, during adolescence that could predict better well-being outcomes for young adults. Participants were 18-26 years old and drawn from the Wave III archival data of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Bearman, Jones, & Udry, 1997), a nationally representative school-based probability sample of participants initially surveyed in 1994-1995, with the Wave III follow-up conducted six years later in 2001-2002. Using a subset of 14,644 participants (615 multiracial, 4,686 monoracial minority, and 9,343 White) the multiracial young adults reported statistically higher levels of depression, drug abuse and physical limitations, and lower levels of self worth than their monoracial counterparts. Effect sizes (partial eta squared), however, were so small, varying between .001 and .003, that these statistical findings did not represent meaningful differences. Therefore, the current study found evidence of fewer difficulties of multiracial young adults relative to their monoracial peers, when compared to previous researchers who studied the same sample as adolescents and found consistent patterns of negative well-being (Milan & Keiley, 2000; Udry et al., 2003). In part this may be because previous researchers did not present effect sizes. Using a second subset of 8,978 participants (402 multiracial, 2,617 monoracial minority, and 5,959 White) a two phased, multi-group structural equation model examined the relationship between adolescence and young adulthood factors and found that multiracial participants had the highest path coefficients for depression and living with both biological parents in comparison to their monoracial counterparts. College attendance was found to not change the relationship of multiracial young adults on reported well-being outcomes in comparison to their monoracial counterparts. In the area of multiracial identification, there was no evidence that multiracial young adults who reported their racial category as multiracial versus monoracial exhibited higher well-being outcomes. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Review of the Literature
  • Defining What it Means to be Multiracial
  • Multiracial Identity Models
  • Factors Influencing Well Being and Identity Development
    • Family environment
    • School, Friends and Neighborhood Environments
    • Generational/Societal Acceptance
    • Multiracial Change From Adolescence to Young Adulthood
    • College Experience
  • Adjustment Outcomes in Multiracial Young People
    • Self Esteem
    • Psychological, Behavior and Health Outcomes Using Add Health Data
• Chapter 3 – Statement of Problem
• Chapter 4 – Method
  • Design Statement
  • Participants
  • Measures
  • Procedures
• Chapter 5 – Results
  • Preliminary Analyses
  • Hypotheses 1a and 1b
  • Hypothesis 2
  • Hypothesis 3
  • Additional Analyses
• Chapter 6 – Discussion
  • Summary
  • Multiracial Young Adults and Well-being
  • Adolescent Predictors of Well-being in Multiracial Young Adults
  • Multiracial Identity Development and Well-being
  • Limitations
  • Implications for Practice
  • Areas of Future Research
• Appendix A – Add Health Project Description
• Appendix B – Initial and Final Items
• Appendix C – Wave I and Wave III Item Comparison
• References

LIST OF TABLES

1. Comparison Psychological Adjustment, Behaviors and Health/Somatization Significant Findings
2. Demographic comparisons of retained and removed participants
3. SEM measurement model fit indices (whole sample Wave I-III subset 8,978)
4. Summary of Initial and Final Latent Constructs and Factors
5. M, SD and Intercorrelations among predictor and outcome variables using Wave I-III subset of 8,978 participants
6. M, SD and Intercorrelations among predictor and outcome variables using Wave I-III subset of 402 multiracial participants.
7. SEM Single and Multi-group Model Fit Indices
8. Multi-group Comparisons on Factor Loadings for the Measurement Model
9. Factor loadings and structural paths released
10. Racial Identification Change from Wave I to Wave III
11. Multiracial identification and Wave III dependent factors
12. College vs. non-college participants compared at Wave I factors
13. Wave I parental income and Wave III outcome factors – Pearson correlation and simple regression
14. Race specific categories using Wave III subset of 14,644
15. Means, Standard Deviations for Wave III outcomes for monoracial groups and selective multiracial groups
16. Significant ANOVA results shown across Wave III dependent factors for specific multiracial groups

LIST OF FIGURES

1. SEM Initial Measurement and Structural Model
2. SEM Final Measurement and Structural Model
3. SEM Final Multi-group Structural Model with Path Coefficients

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