Mixed Race Studies

ENGLISH 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (seminar)

Stanford University
Department of English
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics
Stanford Univeristy

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute “an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.” Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family

University of Chicago Press
2004
200 pages
22 halftones, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Cloth ISBN: 9780226318219
Paper ISBN: 9780226318233

Ronne Hartfield

In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of mixed race with ease and harmony for generations. Her moving family history is filled with such stories, told in beautifully crafted and unsentimental prose. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Hartfield’s book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage.

Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day’s journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author’s family and others in Chicago’s South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family’s response to our racially charged culture.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. Alpha: The Long Mysterious Exodus of Death
2. Beginnings: Strange Fates
3. Sacred Wounds
4. On the Place
5. Matriarchy
6. The Lightning Fields
7. New Orleans
8. Day and the City
9. The Ring
10. A Stern Destiny: Chicago Found and Lost
11. The Post-Depression Years
12. Streetcars
13. In the Castle of Our Skin
14. Dining In
15. Go Down the Street
16. Naming the Holy
17. Strange Fruit
18. Our Father’s Freight Train Blues
19. Lifelines
20. Last Years
21. Omega
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

Barack Obama and the Charm of the Stranger

The Zeleza Post
2009-01-25

Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
San Diego State University

What is source of Barack Obama’s charm? Why was he able to win over whites, blacks and Latinos in a country that is famously partisan? Arguably, there are politicians who are equally gifted but there is seems to be a special aura about Obama.

Commentators have noted how he seems to absorb difference. They project their hopes and dreams on him. He has an aura of objectivity. People trust him. These are all qualities of a particular type of personality referred to in the literature as “the stranger,” “the outsider,” or “the marginal man.”

In an influential essay titled “The Stranger,” the Jewish scholar Georg Simmel argued that the stranger is by nature “no owner of the soil” and thus is able to absorb difference and project an aura of objectivity. Some may be comfortable confessing to the stranger actions and thoughts that hey keep from insiders. According to Simmel: “The stranger may develop charm and significance as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an owner of the soil.”

Both Georg Simmel in “The Stranger,” and his student, Robert E. Park in “Migration and the Marginal Man,” argue that this personality type is often found among people of mixed race or excluded minorities who are caught between two cultures. They are forced to learn both their native ways and the ways of the majority population. W. E. B. Du Bois, Park’s contemporary and also a biracial man, put it eloquently in his famous lament about “double consciousness” that he wished to “merge my double self into a new and truer self.”

The problem, of course, is that it was not possible to resolve this double consciousness because of the one-drop rule that defined biracial individuals as black. The Jewish intellectual in Germany faced the same dilemma. He is caught between cultures, the rural and the urban, the Jewish and the German. One could not be both Jewish and German at the same time just like one could not be black and white at the same time…

Read the entire article here.

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

Harvard University Press
2005
336 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780674025714

Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
Harvard University

2005 New York Magazine Best Academic Book

African American history resounds with calls for black unity. From abolitionist times through the Black Power movement, it was widely seen as a means of securing a full share of America’s promised freedom and equality. Yet today, many believe that black solidarity is unnecessary, irrational, rooted in the illusion of “racial” difference, at odds with the goal of integration, and incompatible with liberal ideals and American democracy. A response to such critics, We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity.

Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he urges us to rethink many traditional conceptions of what black unity should entail. In this way, he contributes significantly to the larger effort to re-envision black politics and to modernize the objectives and strategies of black freedom struggles for the post-civil rights era. His book articulates a new African American political philosophy–one that rests firmly on anti-essentialist foundations and, at the same time, urges a commitment to defeating racism, to eliminating racial inequality, and to improving the opportunities of those racialized as “black.”

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Political Philosophy and the Black Experience
• 1. Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism
• 2. Class, Poverty, and Shame
• 3. Black Power Nationalism
• 4. Black Solidarity after Black Power
• 5. Race, Culture, and Politics
• 6. Social Identity and Group Solidarity
• Conclusion: The Political Morality of Black Solidarity
• Notes
• Index

Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

Duke University Press
2008
264 pages
5 photographs, 2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4058-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4058-4

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Wesleyan University

In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage “dilutes” the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership.

Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians’ land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Got Blood?

1. Racialized Beneficiaries and Genealogical Descendants
2. “Can you wonder that the Hawaiians did not get more?” Historical Context for the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act
3. Under the Guise of Hawaiian Rehabilitation
4. The Virile, Prolific, and Enterprising: Part-Hawaiians and the Problem with Rehabilitation
5. Limiting Hawaiians, Limiting the Bill: Rehabilitation Recoded
6. Sovereignty Struggles and the Legacy of the 50-Percent Rule

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Blackness, Hypodescent, and Essentialism: Commentary on McPherson and Shelby’s “Blackness and Blood”

Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy
Volume 1, Number 1, May 2005

Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, Professor of Philosopy
California State University, Northridge

In their fascinating and thoughtful paper, McPherson and Shelby seek to defend everyday African American understandings of their own identity against the critique launched by Anthony Appiah in his Tanner lectures. I have no deep disagreements with their defense. Instead I will propose what I hope are useful clarifications of some of the key claims in that defense, and perhaps some further contribution to the discussion they have begun.

1. Roughly speaking, Appiah argues as follows: (1) African Americans typically adhere to the rule of hypodescent, understood as a criterion for membership in the group of black people. However, says Appiah, in conjunction with (2) the nationalist belief that black people owe special obligations of support or group solidarity to other black people, this adherence is problematic. For the truth is that (3) many phenotypically white people in the United States in fact have black ancestors and thus, by a strict application of the rule of hypodescent, are black rather than white, regardless of appearance. Given this fact, (4) adherence to the rule of hypodescent requires black people (insofar as they are nationalists) to extend to many phenotypically white people the same kind of support they believe they owe to all black people. But this means (5) that the actions of black nationalists will, insofar as they are based on the facts, undermine the very project of black nationalism. Appiah goes on to argue that in cases where a group’s beliefs about its identity undermine its own political and social projects, the liberal state should intervene to “soul-make,” that is, to reshape the understanding that group has of itself…

Read the entire commentary here.

Reading between the (Blood) Lines

Southern California Law Review
Volume 83, Number 3 (2010)
pages 473-494

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
Hofstra University School of Law

Legal scholars and historians have depicted the rule of hypodescent—that “one drop” of African blood categorized one as Black—as one of the powerful ways that law and society deployed to construct racial identities and deny equal citizenship. Ariela J. Gross’s new book, “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” boldly complicates the dominant narrative about hypodescent rules in legal scholarship. On the one hand, “What Blood Won’t Tell” argues that the legal and social construction of race was far more complex, flexible and subject to manipulation than the scholarship regarding the rules about blood distinctions has suggested. On the other hand, “What Blood Won’t Tell” highlights circumstances, both historically and in recent memory, of the ways in which blood distinctions played crucial roles in shaping the identity of people of color, including indigenous peoples. Importantly, “What Blood Won’t Tell” also examines how blood quantum rules relate to contemporary efforts to reassert indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and claims to lands.

This Review highlights the important contributions of “What Blood Won’t Tell” to our understanding of the racial experience of indigenous peoples and the contemporary methods used to remedy the present-day effects of indigenous peoples’ colonial experience. “What Blood Won’t Tell” advances a more robust account of the racialization of people of color through rules about blood differences in at least three ways. First, it places the colonial experience of indigenous peoples within the larger historical contexts of racial subordination and efforts to promote White domination and privilege. Second, it underscores the federal government’s ongoing responsibility to counteract the long-standing effects of its past misdeeds by addressing indigenous peoples’ unresolved claims to lands that have been stolen from them. Third, it allows us to take a careful look at the relationship between blood quantum rules and the right of indigenous peoples to exercise self-determination. Taken together, these three perspectives reveal the immense challenges inherent to remedying the long-term effects of the racialization and colonization of indigenous peoples.

Read the entire article here.

Professor Marsha Daria to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #160 – Professor Marsha D. Daria
When: Wednesday, 2010-06-30, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Marsha D. Daria, Associate Professor of Education (dariam@wcsu.edu)
Western Connecticut State University

Marsha D. Daria, Ph. D., Associate Professor of Education at Western Connecticut State University, is a former principal and classroom teacher. Her research interests are in multicultural education and health issues. She is currently working on a documentary about multiracial children.

Danbury’s multiracial students to star in film

The Connecticut Post
2010-04-02

Eileen FitzGerald, Staff Writer

Danbury, Connecticut—The three boys wore jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts. The two girls each wore a dozen bracelets and necklaces. They looked like typical students in the library media center at Broadview Middle School.

It was their differences, however, that brought them together Monday. They’re subjects in a documentary in which Western Connecticut State University professor Marsha Daria is examining the identity and social relationships of multiracial children.

Daria is interviewing elementary, middle and high school students to help educators and teacher training programs consider multiracial students in the curriculum and school issues…

Read the entire article here.

Towards a Dialogic Understanding

Politics And Culture
2003-07-08

Victor Kulkosky

Good morning. I’m talking today about a work in progress, so you’ll get more questions than answers this time around. Maybe you’ll get the answers at the next CSA conference, if there is one. I think most of us here agree that one of the main missions of cultural studies is to tell or listen to amplify the untold or undertold story. So for me, that brings up this question: How to tell an emerging story that’s still in search of the language for telling it?

People in interracial or multiracial families find themselves facing this challenge. I find myself in this situation. I’m married to a Black woman, who has a half-sister many people assume is white, who in turn has among her children two girls with red hair and blue eyes and two boys many people would label black. Our little Rainbow Coalition claims African, Lithuanian, German, Irish, Cherokee, English and Dutch descent, and we share genes. What are we?

Heather Dalmage, in her book Tripping on the Color Line, (1999) observes: “Because they do not fit into the historically created, officially named, and socially recognized categories, members of multiracial families are constantly fighting to identify themselves for themselves. A difficulty they face is the lack of language available to address their experiences.” Dvora Yanow (2003), in her study of the relationship between racial/ethnic category making and government policy, writes: “Individuals who cannot find their identity in available categories become invisible, in a sense: without a label, without a vocabulary, their stories are untellable and they themselves are unnarratable.”

…A lot of law and discourse and violence have gone into policing America’s racial borders. White supremacy in the U.S. depends on certainty about who is and who isn’t White. Omi and Winant (1994) refer to the continuing efforts to draw and police racial borders as racial formation, which is carried out through a series of what they call racial projects. They define race as: “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” They make this major point, “we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion.” So I would add that it’s not a question of whether we can and should become color blind – it’s neither possible nor desirable — but about what we see when we see color. Omi and Winant see the concept of race evolving through racial formation, “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed.” They tell us that, “racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.”…

Read the entire article here.