Mixed Race Studies

White people have been passing for black for centuries. A historian explains.

Vox
2015-06-15

Dara Lind, Jetpack Comandante

The story of Rachel Dolezal — the now-former Spokane NAACP president whose parents have claimed she’s white — has opened up an enormously complicated debate about race and identity in general, and blackness in America in particular.

Dolezal has presented herself as “black, white, and American Indian/Alaskan Native,” but her estranged parents say she’s simply white and has been trying to deceive everyone. When the scandal attracted national attention, Dolezal resigned from her NAACP presidency — without saying anything about her race.

Examples of white people passing as black are much less common than the reverse, but there’s still historical precedent for what Dolezal did. Baz Dreisinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, traced the history of white passing in a 2008 book called Near Black. I talked to Dreisinger about how white passing has worked over time, and asked her whether there is ever a legitimate way to “cross-identify” with black culture.

Dara Lind: Can you give us a brief rundown of the history of white people passing as black in America?

Baz Dreisinger: It’s not like this was a massive chapter in American history, like traditional racial passing, which is a massive chapter. But I think people are shocked to discover that there is actually this history of white people who’ve passed as black and that Rachel Dolezal is hardly the first person to come along and do it, and in fact the way that she did it is in line with a number of historical examples.

In the context of slavery, there are both real and fictional accounts of white people who became enslaved — sometimes white people from the North who are kidnapped and sold into slavery as black. In a sense, passing for black becomes secondary to passing for slave. The idea is that the economic basis of this trumps the racial basis — not that they’re separate.

In that context, obviously, there was no change of appearance necessary. But in the 20th century, there’s a technology of passing that has to happen in order for the passing to be successful. Some people dyed their skin black and passed as black — the most famous example of that is John Howard Griffin, who wrote a memoir of his experience passing for a black man in the South during the era of Jim Crow. It’s called Black Like Me. He did it for a temporary experiment; he literally sat under the sun lamp and darkened his skin in order to do that. And there’s a woman who did a similar experiment to Griffin, whose name was Grace Halsell, who actually spent much of her life doing experimental passings — she passed as Native American, she passed as working-class — in order again to write exposés about what it’s like to be those things. So she wrote a memoir in the ’60s called Soul Sister, where she went through the same experiment Griffin did, only 10 years later, she’s in the North in Harlem as well as in the South, and her whole concept was, “I want to see what it’s like as a woman to do this.”

I think music is the most powerful place where we’ve seen this sort of passing happen, and also cultural appropriation — in many ways, my book is as much about cultural appropriation as it is about passing. You have a character like Eminem who’s clearly not passing, but is bringing up all these questions about cultural ownership and cross-racial identification — what does it mean to own a culture? Is there such a thing as owning a culture? Passing is a difficult thing to do today, given the legacies of cultural appropriation, of the metaphorical ripping off of black culture that we’ve seen — and, especially in music, appropriation where there’s literally not a credit being given and also not financial remuneration being given for cultural products that were inventions of nonwhite people…

Read the entire interview here.

The Trouble with Virginia

Michele Beller: writing the mixed-race experience of America, from Buckingham County, Virginia, to Dominica, West Indies, and beyond
2014-11-21

Michele Beller

Finally. My book project is coming to life. My dream of writing is here. As I learn new things or have something interesting to share, I promise you, I’ll post it here. Now. Here is the story of my (first) book:

The Trouble with Virginia is a historical novel based on the true story of my great-great grandmother, Virginia. She was the daughter of a prosperous white plantation owner and a mulatto slave who lived openly as husband and wife — a dangerous way to live in the antebellum South. Virginia grew up with many privileges of her white father, yet her father had to buy her a husband from a nearby plantation. Her first two children were born into slavery—her father’s property. Then came the Civil War, marching right through Virginia’s front yard.

But this isn’t just a story about our distant past. My parents married in 1958–a time when it was still illegal for them to marry in sixteen states; like Virginia, my father is white and my mother is black. My parents believed there’s no such thing as race or color. I didn’t understand until I grew up how defining race still is; it may have been a hundred years later, but when I left home, neither side knew what to do with me. My parents loved me, but they didn’t prepare me for the fight that awaited me out in the world. I had no idea race was such a defining issue…

Read the entire article here.

Black Mexicans face considerable hurdles

Compton Herald
2015-06-05

Alexis Okeowo

Mexicanos negros (black Mexicans) face considerable hurdles; Afro-Mexicans are marginalized and excluded to the point that it is impossible to find any mention of them in official records

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it — and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal’s Harmful Masquerade

The New York Times
2015-06-16

Tamara Winfrey Harris

Rachel A. Dolezal, who stepped down Monday as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., could have been a powerful ally to African-Americans. The participation of white allies has always been important to anti-racism work. By most accounts, she is educated about black cultures and an advocate for black causes. But empathy evolved into impersonation. And Ms. Dolezal’s subterfuge, made easier by the legacy of racism in America, undermines the very people she claims to support.

“I identify as black,” Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning. That may be. But actual black people, like me, don’t have the option of choosing…

…Some people have pointed to this strange case as an illustration that race is malleable. I submit that Ms. Dolezal is a reminder that it is not. Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed. And historically, the path to whiteness has been extremely narrow.

The “one-drop rule,” which, for much of American history, legally defined as black anyone with a black ancestor, was used to keep black people from adopting whiteness. Ironically, it has made it easier for Ms. Dolezal to claim blackness without others questioning the assertion. If they are not themselves of a similar hue to Ms. Dolezal, many black people watching her story unfold can recognize in her features a cousin, parent or grandparent. African-Americans vary in appearance from light-skinned to coal black, straight- to curly-haired, keen- to broad-featured, and every possible combination in between.

This diversity is partly a result of this one-drop rule. The original intent of it was to protect racial privilege. Sometimes, if their appearance borrowed enough from white ancestors, black Americans could “pass” in white society. But that social sleight of hand came with many dangers, such as the chance that black lineage would be outed in the skin or hair of one’s progeny. Segregation simply would not work if society was fuzzy on who got the nice drinking fountain, the front seat on the bus and the right to vote…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal isn’t alone – my family history proves choosing a racial definition is hard

The Guardian
Monday, 2015-06-15

Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard’s father kept his black roots a secret his whole life. Her journey of self-discovery led her to the understanding that believing the results of a DNA cheek swab to be more meaningful than one’s experiences is a ridiculous notion

How do you determine who is black? Is it simply a matter of inheritance – you are what your parents are? Does having a black grandparent make a person black? Must she have been raised as black, in a black community? Is one black ancestor, one drop of blood, enough?

These were the kinds of questions asked during the legal trials undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th century throughout southern and midwestern US states, to determine a person’s “true” racial identity. Then, as now, ancestry trumped lived experience. In Ohio the courts ruled that having 50% black ancestry, a single black parent or two mixed parents, made a person black – and hence socially and politically inferior – while in Louisiana, the “one drop” rule prevailed, and any traceable amount of Negro ancestry denied one certain legal rights, including the right to vote and the right to marry a person of another race…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal’s ‘Passing’ Isn’t So Unusual

The New York Times Magazine
2015-06-15

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennesee

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America.”

Why do we care so much about Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. who apparently misrepresented herself as African-American when, according to her parents, she is Czech, Swedish and German, with some remote Native American ancestry?

In one sense, it’s not at all surprising. Stories of white Americans “passing” as members of other racial and ethnic groups have often captivated the American public — though the cases that have most fascinated us have usually turned on the malicious hypocrisy of the protagonists. In 1965, The Times famously reported that Dan Burros, the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon in New York State and the former national secretary of the American Nazi Party, was once a Jew who not only was a “star” bar mitzvah student at his shul in Queens but also brought knishes to white-supremacist gatherings. In 1991, an Emory University professor drew headlines by unmasking Forrest Carter, the author of a best-selling Native American “memoir,” as Asa Earl Carter, an Alabama Klansman and a speechwriter for George Wallace, the state’s segregationist governor.

But nowhere in the details that reporters and Internet sleuths have uncovered about Dolezal is there any inkling of personal commitment to white supremacy; her work with the N.A.A.C.P., now finished, and as a professor of Africana studies suggests quite the opposite. Her story spins at a far lower orbit of oddity than the trajectories of Burros and Carter, yet she is attracting a similar level of attention. More puzzling still, her case has gone viral at a moment when we are learning that Rachel Dolezals have been much more common in this country’s history than we once might have thought…

Read the entire article here.

White Womanhood Revised

Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel
2015-06-15

Brigitte Fielder, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Whatever else we might say about it, let’s not forget this: Rachel Dolezal’s story is a decidedly American one. Here, I refer not only to story of Dolezal’s racial passing, but also to how Dolezal’s story triggers and reveals America’s racial fascinations. Whatever Dolezal’s motives or ethics, our scrutiny of Dolezal’s race echoes a long history of parsing race in the United States more generally.

Much of the conversation about Dolezal proceeds within long-standing US assumptions about how race “works”: if her biological parents are “really” white people, then so is she, and therefore she cannot be black. While Dolezal is a member of an interracial family, she seems to have no mixed-race African American genealogy, and this is the single deciding factor about her own race. In effect, these assumptions tell us that there is no way for a woman who was born white (i.e., to white parents) to become black. For her to claim blackness, then, is a conscious act of deception.

But for all the clarity these assumptions provide, they are not the only American story about race and womanhood. Even as Americans want race to be simple and essentialist, American racial ideologies rarely allows it to be. Race, Dolezal’s story reminds us, is connected to the history of racial justice work and interracial collaboration, and complicated by relations of power and privilege. Her story also reminds us how race is connected to not only biological relationships, but also to social relationships. For a scholar of race and nineteenth-century literature like myself, Dolezal’s complex (and confusing) story calls to mind other stories of white womanhood revised.

Consider how Dolezal’s American Story aligns with this fictional one: Kate Chopin’s 1893 short story, “Désirée’s Baby.” In the story, Désirée, a woman of unknown parentage, is adopted into a respectable white family and marries the wealthy son of slaveholders, Armand Aubigny. When Désirée and Armand’’s baby begins to show signs of being mixed-race, Armand argues that, because the baby does not look white, it is not white. The appearance of Désirée’s baby calls Désirée’s race into question…

Read the entire article here.

How Census Race Categories Have Changed Over Time

Pew Research Center
2015-06-10

Explore the different race, ethnicity and origin categories used in the U.S. decennial census, from the first one in 1790 to the latest count in 2010. The category names often changed in a reflection of current politics, science and public attitudes. For example, “colored” became “black,” with “Negro” and “African American” added later. The term “Negro” will be dropped for the 2020 census. Through 1950, census-takers commonly determined the race of the people they counted. From 1960 on, Americans could choose their own race. Starting in 2000, Americans could include themselves in more than one racial category. Before that, many multiracial people were counted in only one racial category.

Read the entire article here.

Allyson Hobbs

Morris Educational Foundation
Morristown, New Jersey
2015-05-04

Each issue, we are pleased to circle back with one of our Morristown High School esteemed alumni and catch up.

This spring we caught up with Allyson Hobbs, MHS Class of ’93…

Allyson Hobbs, MHS Class of 1993, Author & Assistant Professor at Stanford University

After graduating Morristown High School in 1993, Allyson attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in 1997. After that, she worked at an advertising agency in New York City for a few years. However, in search of finding her professional passion, she decided to apply to graduate school and attended University of Chicago where she received a Ph.D. with distinction. It was through her experience there that she determined she wanted to pursue her book and a teaching. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. At Stanford, Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-SPAN and National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on CNN.com and Slate.com.

Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, and the Madison Show on SiriusXM.

On a visit back to the East Coast, we visited Allyson and caught up…

…MEF: “Tell us more about your book?”

AH: “Writing the book has been an incredible experience. My book is about racial passing where light-skinned African Americans pass as white during the late 18th century to present. The inspiration for the book was a story about a relative of mine that my aunt had told me about. During the 1920’s and 30’s I had a female cousin who grew up in the Southside of Chicago. She attended a predominately black high school living in a historic African-American neighborhood. After graduating from high school, her mom decided she wanted her to move to California and live life as a white woman.   Since she was light-skinned, her mother believed this was the best thing she could do for her daughter giving her more opportunity and better life experiences. Her cousin did not want to go and pleaded with her mom not wanting to leave the life she known, her community, and her friends. However, her mom insisted so she moved to LA, married a white man, had children (who had no idea about her past).   Ten years later she receives a call from her mom to come back immediately because father is dying. She said she couldn’t come back as she is a white woman now, a life you forced me to have. That story inspired my book and really made me want to explore the history of passing.   We think of passing as a story about individualism and a way to get ahead. We don’t think about people who were so impacted, the story of all the people around them, families, friends, people who have to be accomplices, people who have to keep secret. I also felt that we often look at what is to gain by passing, I thought what would the story would look like with what is lost by passing.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
2002

Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

In June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute…

Read the entire article here.