Mixed Race Studies

Problems with Plaçage: Historical Imagination and Femmes de couleurs libres in Colonial and Antebellum New Orleans

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research
Coastal Carolina University
Issue 3 (Winter 2009)

Philip Whalen, Associate Professor of History
Coastal Carolina University

This essay compares two approaches to understanding the condition of free women of color who struggled to maximize their autonomy and sustain social relations within the repressive environment of colonial and antebellum New Orleans. While recent scholarship squarely addresses how free women of color constructed and sustained a viable Creole heritage, it must reckon with a tradition of primary sources written by moralists, and itinerant observers—ranging from Fanny Trollope and Gustave de Beaumont to Amos Stoddard and Grace King—whose analysis of the daily lives of Creole women was suspect in that it drew disproportionate attentions to the sexual activities of free women of color with white men.

In Louisiana the highest position that can be held by a free woman of color is that of a prostitute… She raises herself by prostituting herself to the white man.
—Gustav de Beaumont, Marie (1835)

Free women of color, or filles de couleurs, occupied a unique and precarious social position in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Louisiana. Legally defined as being of no more than ¼ African ancestry but commonly identified as belonging to a class of free persons exhibiting some degree of color (Garrigus, 1988, p. vii and Berlin, 1998), they rejected identification with black slaves and free whites in order to construct distinct identities for themselves in a racially oppressive and sexually exploitive environment (Gould, 1996, p. 193). The strategies they employed to advance and protect their interests illustrate how they tackled the circumstances and conditions that defined their struggle. These ranged from taking advantage of their slim but not inconsequential legal rights, to educating themselves, to holding and transmitting property, to developing exclusive community networks, to cornering various market activities, and engaging in a variety of legal and extra-legal personal unions.

From the first introduction of slaves to the early twentieth century, Louisiana’s efforts to legally establish a hierarchy of racial identification—especially where Creoles and “mixed bloods” were concerned—were bedeviled by competing identity claims, a disorderly population (Spear, 1999, p. 155), and an environment in which “antimiscegenation measures were flagrantly disregarded” (Lachance, 1994, p. 214). In fact, Doris Garraway notes, “the class of free people of color was quite diverse in gender, color, and circumstance. Referred to variously… the free people of color included former slaves and the descendants of all skin tones” (2005, p. 211). It should also be remembered that early nineteenth-century accounts described white creoles in terms of ethnicity and heritage rather than skin color. Amos Stoddard, for example, described the “Creoles, or native inhabitants” in his Sketches Historical and Descriptive of Louisiana as partly the descendants of the French Canadians and partly of those who migrated “intermixed with some natives of France, Spain, Germany, and the United States, and in many instances the Aborigines” (1973, p. 323). Despite contradictory evidence provided in the narratives of novelists, historians, moralists, and other chroniclers of life in New Orleans who frequently observed that Creole women resembled “the women of Cadiz and Naples and Marseilles; with a self possession, ease, and elegance which the Americans seldom possess” (King, 1920, p. 273), considerations of ethnicity, lineage or linguistic (especially French, German, Caribbean) identity rarely, in the final analysis, inhibited them from using the preferred racial schemas to taxonomize Louisiana’s gens de couleurs. The gens de couleurs, wrote Grace King:

were a class apart, separated from and superior to the negroes, ennobled, were it by only one drop of white blood in their veins…. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleurs. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely guarded distinctions; mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, griffes, each term meaning one more generation’s elevation, one degree’s further transfiguration in the standard of racial perfection; white blood. (1920, p. 333)

This inferior racial identity projected onto gens de couleurs was compounded by moral and social prejudices. Assumptions hardened into received opinion—easily detected in contemporary literature, memoirs, and histories—as racial prejudices were translated into laws designed to increase the legal distinctions between different racial groups were legislated when Louisiana became part of the Unites States (including the reestablishment, by the Louisiana Legislature of the French Code Noir of 1724 as the Black Code in 1806), and New Orleans Creoles evolved into a separate and more self-conscious ethnic caste with fewer exogamous marriages by the mid nineteenth century (Spear, 1999, pp. 101-153 and Lachance, 1994, p. 213, p. 229 and pp. 233-35)…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Own Words with Michele Elam

The Human Experience: inside the humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-15

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

 In this installment of “In Their Own Words” English professor Michele Elam discusses her latest research, which explores how representations of mixed race in literature and the arts are redefining new millennial aesthetics and politics.

Elam’s latest publication is entitled, “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.”

Mixed race women speak out [Review]

rabble.ca
2011-02-14

May Lui

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, eds.(Inanna Publications, 2010)

In the past 20 years Canada has seen a few mixed race anthologies that reflect both the time, place and language that we use to talk about being of mixed heritage and the many complicated social locations this takes us to. The first and the groundbreaking, was Miscegenation Blues: Voices of mixed-race women edited by Carol Camper and published in 1991 [1994]. Ten years later I was fortunate to be part of the editorial team for the journal Fireweed’s issue 75, the Mixed Race issue, published in 2002.

Other Tongues collection of personal essays, poetry and visual art is an excellent addition to the body of writing already out there. In a nice circular way that happens sometimes, Carol Camper wrote the introduction. All these years later, most of the issues are the same, but hearing the experiences of women in their 20s and 30s is heartening, even as they bring sadness and frustration at how little has changed.

The pieces are all short to very short, with the longest piece at around six pages and the average length about two pages long. This is one of the anthology’s strengths as it can show the breadth and range of experiences as well as the vast array of how women have dealt with / coped with / celebrated what their racial identity means to them in the context of Canada and the U.S., where the majority of the contributors live.

There is no mistaking the power of speaking our own stories: having mixed race women naming our struggles within and between our families, who often force us to deny parts that they deem shameful. Whether that’s the parent of colour’s family and existence, or how that’s linked to working class roots, or the naming of one’s identity by others, another continuing theme throughout the collection…

Read the entire review here.

Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women

Sister Vision Press
May 1994
389 pages
8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Paperback ISBN: 092081395X; ISBN 13: 9780920813959
This book is out of print.

Edited by

Carol Camper

Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women is a stunning and long awaited collection of some of the most poignant writing by more than forty women of mixed racial heritage.  Together they explore the concept of a mixed race identity, the fervour of belonging, the harsh reality of not belonging—of grappling in two or more worlds and the final journey home.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Carol Camper Into the Mix
• Edge to the Middle … location, identity, paradox
  • Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar Ms. Edge Innate
  • A. Nicole Bandy Sorry, Our Translator’s Out Sick Today
  • Culture Is Not Static
  • Lisa Jensen “journal entry 25/10/92″
  • Elehna de Sousa Untitled
  • Nadra Qadeer Spider Woman
  • Deanne Achong Untitled
  • Michele Chai Don’t
  • Naomi Zack My Racial Self Over Time
  • Mercedes Baines Mulatto Woman a honey beige wrapper
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue One
  • Michele Paulse Commingled
  • Lara Doan Untitled
  • Lisa Suhair Majaj Boundaries, Borders, Horizons
• But You Don’t Look Like a… faces, body, hair
  • Lisa Jensen (one more time now.)
  • Ijosé Two Halves—One Whole (Part I)
  • Two Halves—One Whole (Part two)
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Untitled
  • Blue
  • Joanne Arnott Mutt’s Memoir
  • Lois Robertson-Douglass No Nation Gal
  • Marilyn Elain Carmen The Issue of Skin Colour
  • Claire Huang Kinsley Questions People Have Asked Me
  • Questions I Have Asked Myself
  • Gitanjali Saxena Second Generation; Once Removed
• My Name is Peaches… obiectification.exoticizaiton
  • Mercedes Baines Bus Fucking
  • Where Are You From? A broken record
  • Michele Chai Resistance 153
  • S.R.W. What is a “Sister”?
  • Barbara Malanka Noblewomen In Exile
  • Stephanie Martin Is true what dem seh bout colrd pussy?
  • Michelle La Flamme Yo White Boy
  • Carol Camper Genetic Appropriation
  • Family Album
• Some More Stories
  • Annharte Emilia I Should a Said Something Political
  • Victoria Gonzalez Nicaragua, Desde Siempre: War fragments from a woman’s pen
  • Marilyn Dumont The Halfbreed Parade
  • The Red & White
  • S.R.W. For My Sister Rosemary: Just Like Mine
  • Claiming Identity: Mixed Race Black Women Speak
  • Joanne Arnott Song About
  • kim mosa mcneilly don’t mix me up
• The Unmasking… betrayals, hard truths
  • Lorraine Mention Journal Entry: Thoughts on My “Mother”
  • Letter to a Friend
  • Nadra Qadeer To a Traveller
  • Nila Gupta Falling from the Sky
  • Rage is my sister
  • Jaimi Carter Are You Writing a Book?
  • Nona Saunders Mother Milk
  • Children’s Games
  • Pussy Willows and Pink
  • S.R.W. Untitled
  • That Just Isn’t Right
  • Michi Chase One
  • Karen Stanley Warnings (Suspense Version)
  • Joanne Arnott Little On The Brown Side
  • Speak Out, For Example
  • Anonymous White Mother, Black Daughter
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue Two
  • Heather Green This Piece Done, I Shall Be Renamed
  • Myriam Chancy Je suis un Nègre
  • Yolanda Retter Quincentennial Blues
• Are We Home Yet?… return to self and cultures
  • Diana Abu-Jaber Tbe Honeymooners
  • Nona Saunders Tapestry I
  • Tapestry II Carole Gray Heritage
  • Bernardine Evaristo Letters from London
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Halifax
  • Kukumo Rocks Route to My Roots
  • Pam Bailey Naming and Claiming Multicultural Identity
  • Maxine Hayman Shortbread and Oolichan Grease
  • Seni Seneviratne Cinnamon Roots
  • Shanti Thakur Domino: Filming the Stories of Interracial People
  • Nila Gupta The Garden of My (Be)Longing 350
  • Gitanjali Saxena Gitanjali’s Bio
  • Kathy Ann March Like Koya
  • Faith Adiele Learning to Eat
  • The Multicultural Self
  • Remembering Anticipating Africa
• Contributors’ Notes

Ten Questions, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book Toronto
2011-03-25

Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to Open Book about the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications). The goal for this exciting anthology was not to nail down what identity means, but rather to open discussion and interrogate the diverse experiences of mixed-race identity and identification.
 
Open Book:
 
Tell us about the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:
 
Other Tongues was born from a combination of necessity and a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies. We are very proud of the finished product and anticipate that it will make many waves in literary and academic communities across the continent!
 
OB:
 
What inspired you to put together this anthology?

ADA:
 
The idea behind this anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women in North America was planted in our minds when we each came across Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), edited by Carol Camper. While we picked up this groundbreaking book at different times in our lives, the anthology had a lasting impact on both of us, an impact that would set the stage for the collaboration that became Other Tongues. We are thrilled to have had Carol Camper contribute to our anthology and continue to be inspired by the women who have responded so warmly to this book. What inspired me personally is, as many interracial women may share experientially, a feeling that my interracial history is a ripe place for critical analysis.
 
OB:
 
The subtitle, Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, suggests that identity is a significant theme for Other Tongues. What are some of the ways that your contributors approach issues of identity?
 
ADA:
 
In seeking work for this book, we asked our prospective contributors to share their own individual experiences and tell their unique stories in relation to the way(s) in which they identified themselves. This process led to the excavation of perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, racial mixes, ages, social classes, sexual orientations and geographical locations. This collection has become a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century.

Yet, Andrea and I made it clear that our agenda was not to define what or how mixed-race identity means, but to open up dialogue. Talking about identity is as dangerous as it is reifying and necessary; as contestable as it is a question of commitment. Authenticity is as much about finding oneself as it is a concept shaped by social norms. In addressing these questions, we asked the women who submitted work to be considered to make a distinction between issues of race and those of cultural identity. In Other Tongues, there are multiple visions and understandings of authenticity/identity, as exemplified by the various sections we have. Where this book treats interracial identities uniquely is in our conscious effort to link creativity to identification; recognizing our potential for creativity as a source of value for writing who we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Golden shadows on a white land: An exploration of the lives of white women who partnered Chinese men and their children in southern Australia, 1855-1915

University of Sydney
November 2006
364 pages

Kate Bagnall

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis explores the experiences of white women who partnered Chinese men and their children in southern Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been based on a wide range of sources, including newspapers, government reports, birth and marriage records, personal reminiscences and family lore, and highlights the contradictory images and representations of Chinese-European couples and their families which exist in those sources. It reveals that in spite of the hostility towards intimate interracial relationships so strongly expressed in discourse, hundreds of white women and Chinese men in colonial Australia came together for reasons of love, companionship, security, sexual fulfilment and the formation of family. They lived, worked and loved in and between two very different communities and cultures, each of which could be disapproving and critical of their crossing of racial boundaries. As part of this exploration of lives across and between cultures, the thesis further considers those families who spent time in Hong Kong and China. The lives of these couples and their Anglo-Chinese families are largely missing from the history of the Chinese in Australia and of migration and colonial race relations more generally. They are historical subjects whose experiences have remained in the shadows and on the margins. This thesis aims to throw light on those shadows, contributing to our knowledge not only of interactions between individual Chinese men and white women, but also of the way mixed race couples and their children interacted with their extended families and communities in Australia and China. This thesis demonstrates that their lives were complex negotiations across race, culture and geography which challenged strict racial and social categorisation.

Introduction: Shadows

Remembering Anglo-Chinese families

During the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of white women formed intimate relationships with Chinese men in New South Wales and Victoria. These relationships took place in Sydney, Melbourne and the bush, in towns, mining camps, and on rural properties. Some were fleeting encounters, others enduring and stable, but from both were bomj children whose faces reflected the differing heritage of their parents. These women, their Chinese partners and their Anglo-Chinese children fanned, mined, and ran stores and other businesses. Some were rich and lived in grand homes and owned large amounts of property, some only barely managed to scrape together an existence. Some load long, happy and prosperous lives together, while others faced tragedy, violence and poverty. Until recently, little lias been known about them. They are historical subjects whose lives have remained in the shadows and on the margins.

This thesis aims to throw light on those shadows by presenting the first in-depth study of intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men in the southern colonies of Australia, and of the families they formed together. Its particular focus is the colony of New South Wales (NSW), between the gold-rush year’s of the 1850s and the early years of the twentieth century. It explores the experiences of these mixed race families, in both southern Australia and southern China, from a variety of perspectives, examining representation and discourse as well as lived experience, across time and place. Beginning in the southern colonies of Australia in the 1850s, it travels through city and bush, into family homes and through public discourse, to finish in China in the early decades of the twentieth century. This thesis is significant for the contribution it makes in both redressing the neglect of interracial relationships in the history of the Chinese in Australia and in contributing to a reassessment of colonial race relations.

This thesis uses the tension between representation and discourse and lived experience, the discrepancies between ‘prescription and practice’,1 to complicate and extend our understanding of interracial intimate relationships and mixed race families in Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It reveals that in spite of the hostility so strongly expressed in discourse, white women and Chinese men came together for reasons of love, comfort, security, sexual fulfilment and the formation of family. By approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives and through a range of sources (archives, fiction, family lore, the press), it demonstrates that there was no one typical experience of intimate relationships across racial boundaries. The lives of my subjects were as varied as the places they lived and the communities they mixed with, and as individual as their own characters and pasts. Their experiences were particular” and individual and demonstrate personal negotiations of marriages and relationships and their place in families, communities and cultures.

The metaphor of the shadow in the title of this thesis represents two tilings. It suggests the way in which stories of the lives of white women, their Chinese partners and their children are a set of interconnected and intersecting plots which weave and blend and twist together, just as shadows shift and change. The idea of the shadow also suggests something not quite seen, something ephemeral, something that is there but not there, so it also represents the hidden presence of mixed race couples and Anglo-Chinese ancestors within Australian families today and within the history of the Chinese in Australia. As will be discussed further in this Introduction, their experiences have for a long time been hinted at, glossed over, and pushed aside. This thesis is an attempt to follow the traces of their existence and to draw together scraps of evidence to form a clearer picture of their lives.

By foregrounding the experiences of mixed race couples and families within both the white and Chinese communities in Australia and China, this thesis aims to challenge the ideas of difference and the boundaries imagined around the Chinese and white populations of the Australian colonies, ideas which have been carried through from nineteenth-century sources to the secondary literature. By suggesting the significance and frequency of intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men, this study seeks to demonstrate that racial categories were inherently permeable and unstable and that interactions between the white and Chinese populations in Australia’s southern colonies were more complex than has often been assumed…

Read the dissertation here.

“As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed”: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity

MELUS
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
pages 31-53

Karen E. H. Skinazi, Instructor of English
University of Alberta

At the tum of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna,” was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme—the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel. Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, “founded upon a cheap and popular device,” and declares, “Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!” (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or retuming to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric—and literature—that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or “brotherhood” between Canadians and Americans.

Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the experience of immigrating as a double outsider: as a racialized figure, and a Canadian. Some critics, knowing Eaton’s background, wonder at the seeming “whiteness” of the characters of Me and Marion. In her study of Eurasian writers, Carol Spaulding, for example, notes: “The . . . narratives [apart from Diary of Delia] written in the first person are Eaton’s autobiography. Me, and her sister’s biography, Marion. All of these are white narrators” (198). Similarly, Dominika Ferens, in her excellent account of the two well-known Eaton sisters, Winnifred and Edith, says Marion, written by both Winnifred Eaton and her sister Sara. Bosse, is “a novel that paradoxically has an all white cast, although we know now that the title character was based on Winnifred’s older sister [Sara]” (141). As Ferens also points out, however, the protagonist of Marion is clearly marginalized because she is not white; both Eaton and Sara/Marion “performed the exotic difference that mainstream society inscribed on their bodies, but they tried to maintain a distance between the role and their sense of self—a distance that allowed them to always keep in sight and occasionally parody the sexist/orientalist frame within which they posed” (142)…

Read the entire article here.

“A Half Caste” and Other Writings

University of Illinois Press
2003
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07094-5

Onoto Watanna (1875-1954)

Edited by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

Elizabeth Rooney

Previously uncollected short stories and essays by the first fiction writer of Chinese ancestry to be published in the U.S.

“What did it mean to be a ‘half caste’ in early twentieth-century North America? Winnifred Eaton lived that experience and, as Onoto Watanna, she wrote about it. This collection of her short works—some newly discovered, others long awaited by scholars–ranges from breathless magazine romance to story melodrama and provides a riveting introduction to a unique literary personality.”—Diana Birchall, author of Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton Onoto Watanna (1875-1954) was born Winnifred Eaton, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother. The first novelist of Chinese descent to be published in the United States, she “became” Japanese to escape Americans’ scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with things Japanese. The earliest essay here, “A Half Caste,” appeared in 1898, a year before Miss Numé: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her best-selling novels. The last story, “Elspeth,” appeared in 1923. Of Watanna’s numerous shorter works, this volume includes nineteen—thirteen stories and six essays—intended to show the scope and versatility of her writing. While some of Watanna’s fictional characters will remind today’s readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, others foreshadow such types as the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (a novel in which Onoto Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Watanna’s characters are always capable, clever, and inventive—molded in the author’s own image.

Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Rocky Mountain Review
Rocky Mountain Language Association
Volume 60, Number 1 (Spring 2006)
pages 25-52

H. Jordan Landry, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, a series of novels advocate that African Americans commit themselves to “loving blackness,” as bell hooks calls African-American ethnic pride (9-10). By loving blackness, the novels promise, African Americans will advance African-American culture, overcome internalized racism, and achieve emotional stability. Together, these novels create a powerful, early 20th-century discourse about embracing ethnic pride and resisting assimilation into white culture.

Unfortunately, this discourse champions its iconoclastic ideas about race by invoking conventional images of women’s gender and sexuality. The popular literary figure of the “mulatto” woman and her role in the triangle of desire, the literary device structuring almost all narrative in the Western literary tradition (Sedgwick 1-20; Girard 1-38), become central to this discourse. The mulatto woman plays one of two roles in the discourse’s triangles of desire. In the first, she conforms to the most conventional form of femininity imaginable and woos the black man toward ethnic pride. According to this discourse, the mulatto woman’s extreme femininity bolsters the black man’s masculinity, confirming his sense of superiority, power, and control. This ego boost endows the black man with the capacity to take pride in African-American culture and contribute to it rather than assimilating into white society. In the second, the mulatto woman defies all the sex and gender norms of dominant culture and lures the black man into vassalage to whiteness. Her rebellion against predefined sex and gender roles feminizes her partner, thereby seducing him into false servility. Since this discourse defines conventional femininity as sexual loyalty, submission, and homage to a black man, the way for the mulatto woman to express ethnic pride is not simply through loving a black man but actually through subordinating herself to one. Of course, embracing inferiority is a limited form of pride indeed. In addition to representing mulatto women’s submission as positive, this early 20th-century literary discourse blames assimilation on mulatto women’s pursuit of freedom from gender and sexual strictures. Thus, mulatto women must regulate their gender and sexuality for ethnic pride to burgeon, and their failure to do so spells a threat to the continuation of African-American culture.

These images of mulatto women circulate widely from the 1910s to the 1920s due to a shift in interest among African-American writers. Whereas late 19th- and turn-of-the-century African-American literature often stressed the need for white culture to accept African Americans, by the 1910s and 1920s, African-American writers began to encourage pride in both African and African-American traditions separate from white culture. This dramatic shift in values results in a corresponding change in representations of mulatto women. Through the two stereotypical roles allotted to mulatto women, writers weight the major “choice” within the erotic triangle—that of ethnic pride or assimilation—with gendered meanings.

In Passing, Larsen reveals that these two dominant fictions about mulatto women effectively regulate women of mixed ethnicity’s performance of gender identity causing them to enact a normative version of femininity. According to Larsen, the two fictions encourage self-regulation by escalating these women’s anxiety. As a result, the women become more aware of others’ external policing of their behavior and, in reaction, internalize these judgments and police themselves. In Larsen’s work, women of mixed ethnicity fear being defined by other African Americans as race traitors if they resist sexual and gender norms. Yet, their attempts to live up to a fictionalized ideal of femininity increases their sense of failure and self-blame as they find it impossible to conform themselves continually to such an image. Moreover, according to Larsen, the more women of mixed ethnicity invest in mulatto female stereotypes, the more they blame each other for and exonerate men from ethnic and sexual betrayal. In Passing, Larsen questions this construction of mulatto women as race and sexual traitors by tracing such blame back to the contemporary literary discourse that imagines racial uplift as dependent on women’s containment…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Black

The University of Vermont
University Communications
2011-03-30

Lee Ann Cox

The new dynamics of biracial identity in America

There’s a rule everybody knows. Not the golden one. Since the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, when “one drop” of black ancestry determined the whole of who you were, black-by-default is a weakened but lingering cultural assumption and it shapes the way many mixed-race people navigate their lives. But a lot has changed, too. Particularly in the pre-civil rights era, passing as white—if appearances made it plausible—was a way to defy racist restrictions. Now, new research by University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna shows that passing has a new face.

In a study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Khanna finds that not only do black-white biracial adults exercise considerable control over how they identify, there is “a striking reverse pattern of passing today,” with a majority of survey respondents reporting that they pass as black.

Passing, as currently defined, is about adopting an identity that contradicts your self-perception of race. Despite having a white mother and a black father, President Obama considers himself black. He is not passing—his identity is solidly rooted within the black community. The people Khanna interviewed, however, view themselves as biracial or multiracial, but choose to pass as black in certain contexts…

Read the entire article here.