Mixed Race Studies

A Romance of (Miscege)Nations: Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1839, 1860)

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2007
pages 1-25
DOI: 10.1353/arq.2007.0000

Yu-Fang Cho, Associate Professor of English; Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

First serialized in The Ladies’ Companion in 1839 and later reprinted in 1860, Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska narrates the tragic interracial union of an Indian princess and a white hunter in northeastern United States during the colonial period. By rewriting the Pocahontas legend, Malaeska allegorizes the dispossession of Native Americans at two significant historical moments in U.S. nation building: the enforcement of the Removal Act throughout the 1830s and westward expansion in the 1850s after the U.S.-Mexican War. The first version of Malaeska was serialized in a women’s magazine tailored specifically for middle- and upper-class female readers, a site of production and reception often characterized as part of the “culture of sentiment.” The second version was the first of the Beadle and Adams’s dime novel series, which often made sensational appeals to audiences across class, gender, age, profession, and ethnicity. Simultaneously inhabiting cultural spaces defined in contemporary analytical terms as mutually exclusive, Malaeska unsettles binary constructions in the study of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. This novel thereby enables an understanding of intersecting racial, gender, class, and cultural formations in relation to U.S. nation building.

Until recently, Malaeska has been dismissed as formulaic, superficial, conservative, and therefore unworthy of scholarly attention. In her important critical re-assessment of Stephens’ Indian tales, Paola Gemme offers an insightful overview of the relationship between the increasingly essentialist dominant racial ideologies from the 1830s to the 1860s and the growing pessimism in depictions of Native American “extinction” in Stephens’ stories. Building on the historical framework in Gemme’s overview (“Rewriting”), this essay examines the ways in which the representation of Indian-white miscegenation in Stephens’ Malaeska simultaneously engages racial ideologies, gender politics, and class formations in cross-fertilized cultural forms. By considering the differences between the 1839 version and the 1860 version, the two contexts of production and reception, and narrative elements beyond the plot, this essay suggests that Malaeska does not necessarily endorse the inevitability of Native American extinction. Rather, Malaeska mobilizes “the Indian question” to critique white supremacy and patriarchy simultaneously: it appeals to women’s shared predicaments as wives, daughters, and mothers to expose the violence of white dominance and its destructive impact on both Native Americans and whites. At the same time, this double critique is limited by its displacement of racial issues onto gender concerns as the text foregrounds women’s alliances across racial and class lines and defines womanhood in terms of the emerging white middle class. The contradiction between the dramatization of racial tensions and their ultimate displacement onto gender issues, this essay suggests, registers an articulation of normative, invisible middle-class white womanhood in the broader context of the emergence of (de)racialized women’s middle-class culture. The term “(de)racialized” highlights the ways in which normative “whiteness” operates as an invisible, “unraced,” universal construction against which all other “races” are defined and thereby racialized. The naturalization and (de)racialization of women’s middle-class culture, this essay suggests, relies on its claim to moral authority and its antithetical relationship to other cultural spheres, such as the heterogeneous cultural spaces where dime novels circulated.

The Elegy of the Vanishing American: Removal, Western Expansion, and the Consequences of the Failed Contract across Racial Lines

From the 1830s to the 1860s, conflicts between whites and Indians were a recurrent theme in cultural representations. As the enforcement of the 1830 Removal Act took place in the late 1830s, Indian tales and poems lamenting the predicament of the “vanishing American” appeared frequently in popular magazines. A generation later many Beadle and Adams dime novels also featured violent encounters between whites and Indians as the clash between white settlers and Indians continued to intensify after the removal era due to westward expansion after the U.S.-Mexican War. While the figuration of different racial others in relation to U.S. national identity varies in different periods, the Indian was particularly important in shaping the emergence of U.S. national identity, most notably perhaps in the republican era when the U.S. struggled to define itself and expanded its territory (Rogin 4). During this period, the Indian functioned as an important icon…

Read or purchase the article here.

Sage Steele Opens Up About Being A Biracial Woman In Sports Media

The Huffington Post
2015-01-21

Justin Block, Associate Sports Editor

Juliet Spies-Gans, Editorial Fellow, HuffPost

Joe Scarnici via Getty Images Sage Steele speaks onstage at the 2013 espnW: Women + Sports Summit at St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort on Oct. 9, 2013, in Dana Point, California.

The ESPN host talks sexism, racism, NBA Saturday Primetime on ABC and that infamous moment with Bill Simmons

Picture the scene: It’s a sweaty, crowded NFL locker room a handful of miles from the heart of Baltimore, a little over a decade ago. There’s a scrum of reporters, trying to inch closer and closer to the prize interview: Ray Lewis. And as the voices shout over one another, urging the linebacker to look every which way, one journalist’s tone differentiates itself from the rest.

It’s the voice of Sage Steele, and as the only woman amid the horde of media members, the octave of her voice allows her to be the one to grab and hold onto Lewis’ attention.

Today, the 43-year-old Steele is known as both the face and the voice of ABC and ESPN’s NBA Countdown. Come Saturday, she’ll be speaking to millions of us through our TV sets, as the host of the new NBA Saturday Night on ABC package. And come June, she’ll ring in the NBA Finals as emcee of the biggest show of the season, working with names like Jalen Rose and Doug Collins to introduce and analyze the league’s marquee event.

But it hasn’t always been like this for Steele. A self-described army brat bullied throughout high school for her biracial background, Steele has dealt with a unique blend of discrimination in her time. One day she’s too white, the next she’s too black. Her curly, un-styled hair is considered either an asset or a detriment, depending on the week. And even as she has received rave reviews for her work with ESPN, she’s anticipating the day when her increasingly grey locks age her out of her job in a way that simply wouldn’t happen to a man.

In a word, she’s surrounded on all sides by -isms. Ageism, sexism, racism — you name it, Steele has felt it. But today, in her 21st year in the biz, the longtime journalist is able to reflect on her time on studio sets and in locker rooms, and decipher where and when those constant currents of isms, don’ts and can’ts have made her stronger, sharper and more apt for the job.

Steele recently spoke with The Huffington Post about everything from the discrimination she’s faced to her relationship with Stuart Scott, from the importance of having thick skin to that GIF of her and Bill Simmons. She’s spent the last two decades in the trenches — those grimy, Gatorade-stained locker rooms of Indianapolis and Baltimore — and now she’s explaining how she was able to stay on her feet through it all, remaining humble, hungry and happy, no matter what…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed Race…So What!

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue: 131 (June 1983)
page 58-60

Sonia Osman

This piece was going to be called ‘Women of mixed Race’, but after many discussions and thought I have decided not to call it that as I find the term ‘mixed race’ racist. Therefore I have gathered together various women’s pieces and have put them in a ‘suitable’ order for you to read. The concept of race is a strange one having no genetic validity at all. There are no genetic differences between Black and White people even though white, male, scientific intellectuals would like us to believe differently. Even anthropology does not include the concept of race. Race is seen as a specific term of abuse. The concepts of ‘mixed race’ or ‘half-caste‘ are racist, they imply that there is a pure race, an idea reminiscent of  ‘Mein Kampf‘ and fascist ideology.

This piece is a very personal piece for me and does not intend to put over any specific political line; it does not intend to educate, but I hope it will make people think.

Sonia’s Piece

To be a woman of mixed race, a halfcaste, a half-breed doesn’t that sound exotic, romantic, erotic …. To Hell with the lot of you I Those are your LABELS, your racist interpretation, your fears internalized and LAID on. I don’t care anymore, do what you will, think what you will, safe in your whiteness, your blackness, your superior purity.

I am ME and I will always stay ME. I will never be white, Anglo-Saxon and PURE. Sorry, you’ll have to make do with a half-Finnish and half-Indian woman born and brought up in the splendours of Brixton, London. Am I angry with my lot? Wouldn’t you be angry if ever since you were knee high you had to put up with taunts, fights, bloody noses, put-downs, comments and insults? But perhaps that is my lot and I should be grateful for it. Thank you so much people, allowing me to be born and brought up in this glorious country of ours. It’s great to feel unwanted.

It’s strange and yet wonderfully weird, ‘cos I know that around the world I am seen as something else: In France I am taken to be a native French woman, (I do speak French, so that helps), in Spain I am taken to be Spanish. People have thought me South American, from Peru or Brazil, or from Turkey or Iran. Strange ain’t it here I am, the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for.

I do feel ‘lucky’ because I have learned things from both my mother and my father. From my father I learnt the proper way to make curry, chapatis and carrot halwa. He would take me to the mosque and show me where and how to pray. From my mother I learnt about her country’s history, the continual war with Sweden and Russia. Strange to think that Finland used to [be] a Russion Duchy. Memories of Finland are full and varied, miles and miles of sweet-smelling pine forest, millions of lakes, fresh-water fish, wild exotic berries, hay-making, and hot days of strawberry-picking. But yet, here in the country which is my Home, I am denied my right to be here. ‘Go home Paki’,—Ha I, where is my home? My home is HERE, and I intend to stay…

Read the entire article here.

Passion – Blackwomen’s Creativity: an interview with Maud Sulter

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue 220 (February 1991)
pages 6-8

Ardentia Verba

An Interview with Maud Suiter

In 1977 Maud Suiter stepped on a train from Glasgow to London and began her current journey into the interior of Blackwomen’s Creativity. She didn’t know at the time that some day she would call herself ‘artist’ or ‘writer’ – not many teenage coloured girls from the Gorbals in Glasgow had trailblazed a path in that direct­ion, so it was a real exploration into the unknown for her when at sixteen she set out to go to college to study fashion. Since then she has gone on to create exhibitions, including Zabat – a stunning series of Blackwomen’s portraits which will be exhibited at Camerawork Gallery in London from March 15-April 19, and has now edited Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, recently published by Urban Fox Press

‘Passion’ features many visual artists including Lubaina Himid, Robyn Kahukiwa, Sutapa Biswas and Janet Caron. However Maud Suiter’s vision of Blackwomen’s Creativity includes activities as diverse as Hairbraiding, Poetry and Performance. The many women included in the book were chosen because of their involvement with the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project, an organisation which Maud Suiter founded in 1982. In creating ‘Passion’, she has not only document­ ed the activities of BWCP but also provided ‘an excellent introduction to the range and intensity of Blackwomen’s Creativity in Britain’

Artists Newsletter

Why did you decide to create ‘Passion’?

In 1982 I was the first Blackwoman to join the Sheba Feminist Publisher’s collective. At that time a variety of the women’s presses were mooting ideas for conventional anthologies of Black writing in the UK. I felt that it was too easy for what were essentially white women’s publishers culling some short stories and poems from Blackwomen and then hailing the fact that they had published x-dozen Blackwomen writers. This especially at a time when they were earning significant incomes from Blackwomen writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

As Alice Walker has pointed out, Blackwomen must read history for clues not facts, and it seemed essential to leave clues as to a more holistic range of our artistic pursuits. Obviously no academic course in Britain is geared towards working class Blackwomen’s experience across the board, but so many of us have a vast appetite for knowledge—for a herstory. We must create our own, which is what I set out to achieve with Passion.

There comes a time in many of our lives when we say ‘Girl, get yourself a piece of paper’. Around 1985 I was getting so many requests from students, mainly from Blackwomen, to give interviews to inform their dissertations. Hours and hours of Blackwomen’s work goes—unpaid and unacknow­ledged—into quite literally saving Blackwomen from failing their degrees. So few informed Blackwomen artists are employed in institut­ions, that we are co-erced into helping out, at the very last minute, to save Blackwomen artists, no, let me correct that, Black students across the board, that it was obvious that the wheel could not be eternally re-invented.

Passion offers schools, colleges and commun­ity venues the opportunity to invest in a vast wealth of information about our work during the 80’s and then draw from that information in a more creative and challenging way. All of us face racism and sexism in our explorations, and the wonderful articles and portfolios in Passion signpost a continuum of experiences, our litany of survival, which has created the situation where we can, like the Blackwomen’s Creat­ivity Project, network internationally from a position of equality not imperialism.

And so to recap, my ambition was to look at Blackwomen’s Creativity across a spectrum of activities including fine art, childbearing, opera, theatre etc. It is not possible to create a hierarchy of our artistic fields as we are living as Blackwomen in the aftermath of slavery and imperialism. Therefore we need to recognise our creative practices as survival and press for their development from that position. It is no use to sit back on our laurels and think OK, so we were there. We need to be here now, and we need to ensure that we continue to create in the future…

Read the entire interview here.

She Loved Baseball: The Effa Manley Story

Balzer + Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2010-10-19
32 pages
8.5 in (w) x 11 in (h) x 0.25 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061349201
eBook ISBN: 9780062184801

Audrey Vernick

Illustrated by Don Tate

Effa always loved baseball. As a young woman, she would go to Yankee Stadium just to see Babe Ruth’s mighty swing. But she never dreamed she would someday own a baseball team. Or be the first—and only—woman ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

From her childhood in Philadelphia to her groundbreaking role as business manager and owner of the Newark Eagles, Effa Manley always fought for what was right. And she always swung for the fences.

From author Audrey Vernick and illustrator Don Tate comes the remarkable story of an all-star of a woman.

UNF professor explores the impact of skin tone on the everyday lives of African-American women

The Florida Times-Union
2016-01-18

Rhema Thompson

JeffriAnne Wilder always knew African-Americans came in many shades. She saw it in her own family, from her light-skinned older sister to her two dark-skinned brothers. Her complexion fell somewhere in the middle.

“I saw the variation at home, but I didn’t place any value on it,” she recalled.

Around age 10 that began to change. She noticed the light-skinned girls in her predominantly black Cleveland elementary class seemed to be treated differently. Other students seemed enamored by their creamy complexions and wavy hair.

Decades later, that sentiment hit closer to home when she became pregnant with her daughter.

“I had lots of people just assume because my ex-husband is biracial and light-skinned with green eyes that she was going to be light-skinned, too,” she said. “ ‘Oh, you’re going to have the prettiest daughter. She’s going to be so pretty. She’s going to be light and blah, blah, blah,’ and I remember telling people ‘What happens if she’s not light-skinned? What if she ends up like me?’ ”

Now, an associate sociology professor at the University of North Florida and director of the school’s new Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations, Wilder is sharing her observations and the experiences of 66 other black women in her first published book “Color Stories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century

Praeger
October 2015
198 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4408-3109-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4408-3110-2

JeffriAnne Wilder, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida

Colorism continues to impact women of African descent in a new generation and century.

This book offers an in-depth sociological exploration of present-day colorism in the lives of black women, investigating the lived experiences of a phenomenon that continues to affect women of African descent.

Race still matters. And for black women, the related issues of skin tone are just as important today as in decades past. Part cultural commentary, part empirical analysis, this book offers a compelling study and discussion of colorism—a widely discussed but understudied issue in “post-racial” America—that demonstrates how powerful a factor skin color remains in the everyday lives of young black women. Author JeffriAnne Wilder conducted interviews with dozens of young black women about the role of colorism in their everyday lives. Collectively, these findings offer a compelling empirical and theoretical analysis of colorism in key areas of 21st-century life, including within family and school settings, in the media, and in intimate relationships.

The culmination of nearly two decades of the author’s deep entrenchment in colorism studies, Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century provides a new perspective on a controversial issue that has been a part of black culture and academic study for generations by exploring how the contemporary nature of colorism—from Facebook to the First Lady to Beyoncé—impacts the ideas and experiences of black women. This work serves as essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about the historical and contemporary significance of colorism in modern-day America, regardless of the reader’s race, sex, or age.

Features

• Presents a contemporary sociological analysis of the issue of skin-tone prejudice and discrimination and the unique social and cultural implications for black women in today’s society
• Provides readers with a vocabulary for understanding and discussing the unique features and characteristics of colorism in the 21st century
• Supplies scholarly analysis balanced with thought-provoking testimony from more than 60 black women between the ages of 18 and 25 on how color matters in their daily lives
• Offers concrete strategies for change and empowerment in dismantling the paradigm of colorism

Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles

Scarecrow Press (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
January 1998
298 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57886-001-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4617-0708-0

James Overmyer, Member
Negro Leagues Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives and considered sports their exclusive domain. That her life story has remained unchronicled can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Baseball League.

This book furthers a growing awareness of black baseball before integration and profiles many of the other highly-competitive owners in the Negro league. It also describes a thriving black community in Newark that took the Newark Eagles into their hearts, creating a fascinating relationship between a community and their sports team.

This book was the first to draw extensively on Eagle team records, left behind by Mrs. Manley when she left Newark in the 1950s, and rediscovered nearly intact thirty-five years later. The files are the most comprehensive source of information about the Newark Eagles. They reconstruct the relationship between the baseball team and the community to an extent never thought to be possible. Also included is material from Mrs. Manley’s scrapbook chronicling her days as a baseball owner and an active home front volunteer during World War II. Her scrapbook is now part of the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

This important work shines the spotlight on a previously unsung segment of baseball history.

Originally published in cloth as Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles, No. 1 in the American Sports History Series.

Photographing Multiracial Families In Scotland: Celebrating mothers, daughters and diversity through portraits

Medium for Pixel Magazine
2015-12-17

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

Portrait photographer Kim Simpson began her Exottish project after her daughter, who is of mixed heritage, experienced a series of racial insults in her primary school in Scotland.

Kim says she hopes her portraits — which feature families with some “visual differences” between their members — will encourage viewers to revisit their engrained ideas of what it looks like to be Scottish.

For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with Kim about the work and her experience as a parent in a multiracial family.

Emily von Hoffmann: “Girls and Their Mothers” is one part of the larger Exottish project. What does “Girls and Their Mothers” entail? Who are these women?

Kim Simpson: “Girls and Their Mothers” is a collection of portraits of mixed race girls, of all ages, with their mothers — 48 portraits featuring 16 different families in a mix of individual and group portraits.

Instead of questioning their ancestry or scrutinizing their appearance, I chose to photograph girls and women of mixed heritage and their mothers with an intent to question social perception. These images display their relationships, linking these girls and their mothers together while at the same time respecting their disparity…

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

…EvH: What sort of national dialogue, or vocabulary even, around race and appearance exists in Scotland? Is it discussed in school, for instance? I’m interested in thinking about this in comparison to the current Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and the greater mainstream attention to identity issues of multiracial individuals.

KS: Black Lives Matter is extremely relevant in Scotland, especially at the moment. We have had an awful tragedy that saw the senseless end of Sheku Bayoh’s life at the hands of police officers as he was suffocated during an arrest in Fife, Scotland. Justice has not been served in this instance and it echoes all the hallmarks of what has been going on across the water with concerns of interactions between police officers and members of the black community…

Read entire the interview here.

Maud Sulter

The Herald
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
2008-03-21

Artist and writer; Born September 19, 1960; Died February 27, 2008. MAUD Sulter, who has died after a long illness aged 47, was an extraordinarily gifted visual artist, writer, playwright and cultural historian.

She was born in Glasgow, of Scots and Ghanaian descent: in her poem Circa 1930, she pointed out that these two cultures “are not as disparate as they might/at first seem. Clan-based societies/With long memories and global diasporas”. The exploration of the continuing presence of Africa in Europe was one of her principal themes, explored through her art in a variety of media: text, photography, sound and performance.

She was active in feminist communities in London in the early 1980s, and while working with a women’s education group programmed Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall showcasing black women’s creativity…

…As well as her academic writing, she published several collections of poetry: As a Blackwoman (1985), which won the Vera Bell Prize for poetry that year; Zabat (1989); and Sekhmet (Dumfries & Galloway Council, 2005); and a play about Jerry Rawlings, Service to Empire (2002). “I often address issues of lost and disputed territories, both psychological and physical,” she wrote in 1994. “The central body of my poetic work is unequivocally the love poetry which is addressed to both genders.” Sekhmet begins with a roll-call of love and gratitude to friends, lovers, family across the world, to medics, and to the ancestors, “who walked beside me when I needed them most and carried me forward when the terrain was too rough but never absolve me of the responsibility for my own life and identity”…

Read the entire obituary here.