Mixed Race Studies

Mixing Race: The Kong Sing Brothers and Australian Sport

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 39, Issue 3 (2008)
pages 338-355
DOI: 10.1080/10314610802263323

Gary Osmond, Lecturer
School of Human Movement Studies
University of Queensland

Marie-Louise McDermott
Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia

Little research exists on the participation of Chinese in Australian sport in the colonial or Federation periods. This article examines the involvement of three, hitherto-unknown, amateur sportsmen in late nineteenth-century Sydney—the Kong Sing brothers. Otto, Ophir, and George Kong Sing, sons of a Chinese shopkeeper and white Australian mother, participated in several sports over two decades, enjoying varying degrees of success and recognition. Adopting a mixed-race perspective, this article examines their identity in various contexts as Chinese, Australian, and Anglo-Chinese in order to explore the complexities of racial identity and the lived Chinese Australian experience.

My favourite trivia question in baseball is, ‘Which Italian American player for the Brooklyn Dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a season?’ Nobody ever gets it right, because the answer is Roy Campanella. who was as Italian as he was black. He had an Italian father and a black mother, but he’s always classified as black.

Stephen Jay Gould, 2003

Reformulations of race as socially Constructed, rather than biologically determined, have highlighted the multilayered, hybrid, and complex dimensions of racial identity and it is widely accepted that racial and other cultural identities are shaped by flux, discontinuities, and rupture. Appreciation of the ambivalence of constructed racial identities has challenged the ‘binary categorisations and oppositions of “old” versions of racial difference. Identities of individuals and groups cannot easily and safely be fixed or generalised, despite dominant race-thinking which seeks simple, common racial denominators, as demonstrated in the sporting context by Gould above. His example of Campanella draws attention to the concept of mixed race, around which a substantial literature has grown. As well as acknowledging individual realities, mixed-race…

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Una Raza, Dos Etnias’: The Politics Of Be(com)ing/Performing ‘Afropanameño’

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2008
DOI: 10.1080/17442220802080519
pages 123-147

Renée Alexander Craft, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This article analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanameño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial (Colonial Black) and Afroantillano (Black West Indian) identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. This essay examines the major discourses that shaped ‘blackness’ in four key moments of heightened nationalism in 20th-century Panamá. I refer to these moments as: Construction (1903–1914), Citizens versus Subjects (1932–1946), Patriots versus Empire (1964–1979), and Reconciliation (1989–2003).

In Panamá, Blacks are not discriminated against because they belong to a low social class, they belong to a low social class because they are discriminated against (Justo Arroyo, African Presence in the Americas)

Los blancos no van al cielo, por una solita mafia; les gusta comer pañela sin haber sembrado caña	[Whites do not go to heaven for a single reason They like to eat sweet candy Without sowing sugar cane]
		Chorus to a Congo song

On Friday 26 May and Saturday 27 May 2006, I witnessed the inauguration of the first ‘Festival Afropanarneno’ in the Panamá City convention center. Supported by the Office of the First Lady, the Panamánian Institute of Tourism and the Special Commission on Black Ethnicity, the event included 20 booths featuring black ethnicity exhibitions, artistic presentations, food and wares representing the provinces of Panamá, Coclé, Bocas del Toro, and Colón—the areas with the highest concentrations of Afropanarneño populations. As the Friday celebration drew to its apex, a special commission appointed by President Martín Torrijos in 2005 presented him with the fruits of their year-long endeavor: a report and an action plan on the ‘Recognition and Total Inclusion of Black Ethnicity in Panamánian Society’. Using public policy advances in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean to bolster their case (such as Colombia’s 1993 Law of Black Communities, Brazil’s 1998 Body of Laws against Racial Discrimination, Nicaragua’s 1996 Law of Autonomy of the Atlantic Coast, and Peru’s 1997 Anti-discriminatory Law, 1997), the Special Commission built on the progress made through ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Day of Black Ethnicity’] to open a wider space for the recognition of social, economic, and cultural contributions of black ethnicity to the nation-building process.

Instituted into law on 30 May 2000, ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ is an annual civic recognition of the culture and contributions of people of African descent to the Republic of Panamá (Leyes Sancionadas). The date 30 May coincides with the date in 1820 when King Fernando VII abolished slavery in Spain and its colonies, including Panamá. Significantly, the law stipulates that the Ministry of Education and the Institutes of Tourism and Culture should organize relevant activities to commemorate the holiday, and that all schools and public institutions should celebrate it as a civic proclamation of ‘black ethnicity’ contributions to the culture and development of Panamá (Van Gronigen-Warren & Lowe de Goodin, 2001, p. 83). I have witnessed black ethnicity day celebrations in the cities of Panamá, Colón and/or Portobelo (located in the province of Colón) each year from 2000 to 2006 and have watched them grow from a celebration limited to 30 May to an informal, week-long commemoration, to its most recent form ‘El Mes de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Month of Black Ethnicity’].

This essay analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanarneño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial and Afroantillano identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. In the micro-Diaspora of Panamá, black identity formations and cultural expressions have been shaped largely by the country’s colonial experience with enslaved Africans via Spain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and neo-colonial experience with contract workers from the West Indies via the United States’ completion and 86-year control of the Panamá Canal. Blackness in Panamá forks at the place where colonial blackness meets Canal blackness…

…As in most Latin American and Caribbean countries, centuries of intermarriage between African, indigenous and, in the case of Panamá, Spanish populations yielded a large mestizo (mixed race) classification. Throughout the 20th-century, the Congo tradition has consistently been identified by the community and the State as a black performance tradition even though the bodies of its practitioners have been categorized by demographic data as ‘mestizo’. Four centuries of evolving interchange and dialectical assimilation in a territory the size of South Carolina has rounded the edges of Panamánian blackness and whiteness without removing them as opposing place-holders on a spectrum of privilege. Considering ‘whiteness’ at the apex of privilege and ‘blackness’ at the base, Afro-Colonials remain on or near the bottom, even within the category of mestizo. As Peter Wade (2003, p. 263) argues regarding mestizaje in Colombia, ‘black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participatory in the overarching process of mestizaje, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in “national society”‘…

…Part of the animosity directed toward West Indians was caused by Canal Zone Jim Crow policies, which not only segregated West Indian workers as ‘black” and therefore inferior, but also constructed a blackness elastic enough for all Panamánian workers, regardless of ethnicity, to fit uneasily and resentfully alongside them. Although the system of paying salaried workers in gold and of day laborers in silver began under the French-controlled Canal, these labels took on racial connotations under United States control, which translated ‘gold roll’/’silver roll’ into ‘whites only’/’blacks only’.

Not only did the US system treat Panamánian Canal workers as black immigrants in the belly of their own country, but it privileged West Indians over them because West Indians spoke English. Living in substandard conditions, in the staunchly segregated society of the Canal and paid a fraction of ‘gold roll’ salaries, West Indian workers still received wages almost double those of Panamánians outside the Zone. Further, the more fluid Panamánian ethnoracial caste system that had produced darker-skinned Panamánian presidents and allowed for greater upward mobility within the system by acquisition of wealth, education and/or marriage stiffened as a response to US Jim Crow attitudes and legislation (LaFeber, 1979, pp. 49-51). For these reasons, many Panamánians, including Afro-Colonials, who often fell victim to the same Jim Crow attitudes that oppressed West Indians, resented them. To make matters worse, their collusion with the United States through English had rendered Panamánians foreign within their own home country. This enduring sense of injustice exploded into a mid-century nationalist movement that inverted the paradigm privileging Spanish and relinquishing the citizenship rights of non-Spanish speakers, thus pitting Afro-Colonial communities against West Indians…

Read the entire article here.

The fascist who ‘passed’ for white

The Guardian
2007-04-04

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

Lawrence Dennis was a leading light in the American fascist movement of the 1930s. He was a fan of Hitler and a self-avowed anti-semite. Now a new book reveals that he was actually black—although even his wife didn’t know. Gary Younge reports

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America’s bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black. It turns out that the man Life magazine once described as “America’s number one intellectual fascist” was, in fact, a light-skinned African American, born in the segregated South—although he “passed” for white among the greatest race hatemongers known to mankind.

In a new book, The Colour of Fascism, Gerald Horne reveals how Dennis managed to live a lie for his entire adult life. “It’s not clear that his wife knew that he was black,” says Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston. “He certainly never told his daughter. When she asked him, he would just smile enigmatically.”…

…”Passing” was common in American society at the time. Despite laws against miscegenation, the pervasive practice of masters raping their slaves had produced a large number of light-skinned people. Under America’s rigidly enforced codes of racial supremacy, any child of a mixed-race relationship was deemed “black”, regardless of their complexion. They called it the one-drop rule: one drop of “black blood” made you black…

Read the entire article here.

Beginnings of Miscegenation of Whites and Blacks

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 3, Number 4 (October 1918)
pages 336-453

Carter G. Woodson, Founder

Although science has uprooted the theory, a number of writers are loath to give up the contention that the white race is superior to others, as it is still hoped that the Caucasian race may be preserved in its purity, especially so far as it means miscegenation with the blacks. But there are others who express doubt that the integrity of the dominant race has been maintained.[442] Scholars have for centuries differed as to the composition of the mixed breed stock constituting the Mediterranean race and especially about that in Egypt and the Barbary States. In that part of the dark continent many inhabitants have certain characteristics which are more Caucasian than negroid and have achieved more than investigators have been willing to consider the civilization of the Negro. It is clear, however, that although the people of northern Africa cannot be classed as Negroes, being bounded on the south by the masses of African blacks, they have so generally mixed their blood with that of the blacks that in many parts they are no nearer to any white stock than the Negroes of the United States.

This miscegenation, to be sure, increased toward the[Pg 336] south into central Africa, but it has extended also to the north and east into Asia and Europe. Traces of Negro blood have been found in the Malay States, India and Polynesia. In the Arabian Peninsula it has been so extensive as to constitute a large group there called the Arabised Negroes. But most significant of all has been the invasion of Europe by persons of African blood. Professor Sergi leads one to conclude that the ancient Pelasgii were of African origin or probably the descendants of the race which settled northern Africa and southern Europe, and are therefore due credit for the achievements of the early Greek and Italian civilizations.[443]

There is much evidence of a further extension of this infusion in the Mediterranean world.

“Recent discoveries made in the vicinity of the principality of Monaco and others in Italy and western France,” says MacDonald, “would seem to reveal … the actual fact that many thousand years ago a negroid race had penetrated through Italy into France, leaving traces at the present day in the physiognomy of the peoples of southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and western France, and even in the western parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. There are even at the present day some examples of the Keltiberian peoples of western Scotland, southern and western Wales, southern and western Ireland, of distinctly negroid aspect, and in whose ancestry there is no indication whatever of any connection with the West Indies or with Modern Africa. Still more marked is this feature in the peoples of southern and western France and of the other parts of the Mediterranean already mentioned.”[444]

Because of the temperament of the Portugese this infusion of African blood was still more striking in their country. As the Portugese are a good-natured people void of race hate they did not dread the miscegenation of the races. One finds in southern Portugal a “strong Moorish, North African element” and also an “old intermixture with those[Pg 337] Negroes who were imported thither from Northwest Africa to till the scantily populated southern provinces.”[445] This miscegenation among the Portugese easily extended to the New World. Then followed the story of the Caramarii, the descendants of the Portugese, who after being shipwrecked near Bahia arose to prominence among the Tupinambo Indians and produced a clan of half-castes by taking to himself numerous native women.[446] This admixture served as a stepping stone to the assimilation of the Negroes when they came…

Read the entire article here.

Notions of race in modern-day Mexico addressed in lecture, exhibit

The Daily Tar Heel
2013-04-03

Tat’yana Berdan

The Daily Tar Heel is the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The complicated and nuanced issue of race in Mexico is often overlooked, but The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History hopes to spark an inclusive conversation.

The Stone Center is presenting a conversation with Christina Sue and Laura Lewis, two scholars with extensive knowledge of the issue of race in modern-day Mexico.

In addition to the talk, the Stone Center is also unveiling a new photo exhibit, “La Costa Chica,” by Wendy Phillips, a UNC alumna.

“Here at the Stone Center, we have a tradition of discussing these types of issues,” said Clarissa Goodlett, the Center’s program and public communications officer.

Goodlett said the Center chose to host this particular event as part of its ongoing exploration of the idea of diaspora and where people of African descent live today.

Christina Sue, assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors speaking at the event, said she is looking forward to engaging in conversation with Laura Lewis, the other author that will be present.

“I hope we can both learn from each other, and I hope it will further our understanding of Mexico,” Sue said.

Sue said her book, “Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico,” discusses the ideas or race, racism and race mixing in modern day Mexico.

Sue said the book, which was inspired by what Sue observed doing field research in Veracruz, Mexico, focuses on the difference between the Mexican government’s attitude towards the issue of race versus the reality faced by mixed race people living in Mexico…

Read the entire article here.

The Perils of Passing: The McCarys of Omaha

Nebraska History
Volume 71, Number 2 (Summer 1990)
pages 64-70

Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (1931-2011), Former Chancellor and Emeritus Alumni Distinguished Professor of History (1931-2011)
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

This article presents various aspects of light-skinned black people “passing” for whites by examining the 1919 case of Francis Patrick Dwyer’s suit to annul his marriage to Clara McCary Dwyer after becoming suspicious that their new baby boy had Negro blood. While Dwyer was correct, he failed to win his suit, and his wife was able to divorce him and receive child support in 1923.

A strikingly handsome young woman and her three-year-old son, both fairhaired and blue-eyed, were the star attractions in a sensational court case in Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1919. Her name was Clara McCary Dwyer, whose husband, Francis Patrick Dwyer, had filed suit to have their marriage annulled on the grounds that she had “negro blood in her veins.”· Until 1913 Nebraska law prohibited marriage between whites and persons possessing one-fourth or more Negro blood. In that year the legislature changed the law to ban marriages between white persons and those having “one-eighth or more negro, Japanese or Chinese blood.”

The courtroom drama, which occurred during the Red summer of 1919 when twenty-five race riots occurred in the United States, epitomized the prevailing white attitudes toward race and color. Throughout the spring and summer of that year, the denunciation of blacks as criminals, especially rapists, by the press and trade unions in Omaha undoubtedly had heightened racial tension in the city that ultimately erupted in a riot there late in September 1919. A complicating factor in the Dwyer case was that it involved the phenomenon of “passing,” a process by which fair-complexioned people of Negro ancestry “crossed over the color line” into the white world.

Several forms of “passing” existed among blacks in the United States. One was temporary or convenience passing by which fair-complexioned Negroes occasionally crossed the color line in order to secure decent hotel, travel, and restaurant accommodations or to attend the theater without having to sit in the Jim Crow balcony. Another form was known as “professional passing,” where by a person passed for white in order to hold jobs open only to whites but continued to maintain “a Negro social life.” The third form was passing permanently for white, which involved blotting out the past and severing all contacts with the black community. Among other risks was that of exposure. Because of the secretive nature of permanent passing, it is impossible to ascertain how many black Americans actually passed. Estimates ranged from a few hundred to many thousands annually.

Francis Dwyer, a clerk in a jewelry and leather goods store owned by his brother-in-law, assumed his wife was white until the birth of their son in 1916, when the attending physician, for reasons that are unclear, raised the possibility of Negro ancestry. Once Dwyer became suspicious of his wife’s racial heritage, he apparently refused to live with her and their son. He joined the army in 1917 and upon being mustered out of military service, decided to end the marriage legally on the grounds that he had been deceived by his wife. Because he was Catholic and had been married in the Catholic church, he insisted upon an annulment rather than a divorce…

Read the entire article here.

Masters and Slaves: ‘Sugar in the Blood,’ by Andrea Stuart

The New York Times
2013-03-29

Amy Wilentz

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire By Andrea Stuart, Illustrated. 353 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.

On a trip to Paris, I recently had the same shocked realization that Andrea Stuart describes in her astounding new book, “Sugar in the Blood.”

Slaves built this, I thought as I wandered from one grand 18th-century monument to the next. How rarely we acknowledge that Europe’s great cities were built on profits from the labor and blood of slaves cutting sugarcane half a world away.

Stuart, a London-based author of Barbadian ancestry, writes of contemporary England: “Sugar surrounds me here.” The majestic Harewood House in Leeds was built with money from Caribbean sugar plantations, she points out, as was the Codrington Library of All Souls College in Oxford and Bristol’s mansions. The slaves of the West Indies built this wealth while unaware of its existence, or of their own connection to it. Without them, the vast empire that gave the world Victoria and Dickens might never have existed.

In this multigenerational, minutely researched history, Stuart teases out these connections. She sets out to understand her family’s genealogy, hoping to explain the mysteries that often surround Caribbean family histories and to elucidate more important cultural and historic themes and events: the psychological after­effects of slavery and the long relationship between sugar — “white gold” — and forced labor…

…There is not a single boring page in this book, which — as a longtime reader of nonfiction and skipper of boring pages — I can attest is an achievement in itself. In every chapter of “Sugar in the Blood,” history, fact, analysis and personal reflection combine to move the narrative forward, both the grand story of slavery and sugar and the more mundane but always fascinating story of family and business. And beneath every banal moment of cooking or cleaning, of selling or buying, of dressing or undressing, the threat of uprising and rebellion beats loudly, as it must have done on the plantation…

Read the entire review here.

A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of nineteenth-century visual culture
Volume 8, Issue 2 (Autumn 2009)

Will South, Chief Curator
Dayton Art Institute

Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1907

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Oil on canvas, 49″ × 35½”. Hampton University Museum.

This article examines Henry Ossawa Tanner’s complex sense of his own racial identity. Tanner’s conflict was born of the fact that in his personal adult life he walked a fragile line between his whiteness and his blackness; in France, he systematically worked to remove race from the equation of his life. The author also identifies for the first time the source of his best-known painting, The Banjo Lesson.

Race remains at the heart of Henry Ossawa Tanner studies. Though he would have wished it not to be so, the issue of Tanner’s African American identity defined him in the late nineteenth century and continues to be the criterion by which twenty-first-century audiences appraise his legacy. Tanner struggled and sacrificed to become a recognized and accomplished painter of spiritual narratives, while we would have him also be a reluctant hero—the artist who against all odds overcame social barriers to shine at the Paris Salons, see his work purchased by the Musée du Luxembourg, and be compared critically with James McNeill Whistler. Tanner’s path to artistic success was indeed marked by instances of insult and injustice, and his career ascendancy was a remarkable feat. He lived his life, however, one that was driven by a commitment to the creation of art, in conflict with the hopeful expectations of many of his contemporaries. Tanner’s conflict, one of enormous pain and complexity, was born of the fact that in his personal adult life he walked a fragile line between his whiteness and his blackness; in France, he systematically worked to remove race from the equation of his life.

In 1914 the poet and art critic Eunice Tietjens wrote an article provisionally titled “H. O. Tanner” that she had hoped to publish in the International Studio.[1] She sent Tanner a draft of the article along with a letter, which read in part:

If there is anything in the article that you don’t like or don’t think is true I’m afraid you’ll have to expostulate to the editor, if he accepts it [the article]. The “if” seems large to me tonight, but then I’m tired . . .

Do write to me what you think of it. Here’s luck to us![2]

Tanner, in his rely to that letter, stated that the one problem he had with her article was contained in its last paragraph which reads:

In his personal life Mr. Tanner has had many things to contend with. Ill-health, poverty and race prejudice, always strong against a negro, have made the way hard for him. But he has come unspoiled alike through these early struggles and through his later successes. Simple and sincere like his canvases he has quietly followed his own instinct for beauty and has already given to the world many unforgettable paintings, while there are yet many years of work before him.[3]

Tanner’s objection was to the inference that he is a Negro. In the most comprehensive study done to date on the artist, the 1991 Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dewey Mosby characterizes Tanner’s response to Tietjens’s article as being revelatory of “the complicated nature of Tanner’s own thinking about race.”[4] Tanner’s reply begins:

May 25—1914
Dear Mrs. Tietjens—

Your good note & very appreciative article to hand I have read it & except it is more than I deserve, it is exceptionally good. What you say, is what I am trying to do, and in a smaller way am doing it (I hope).

The only thing I take exception to is the inference in your last paragraph—& while I know it is the dictum in the States, it is not any more true for that reason—

You say “in his personal life, Mr. T. has had many things to contend with. Ill-health, poverty, and race prejudice, always strong against a negro”—Now am I a Negro? Does not the 3/4 of English blood in my veins, which when it flowed in “pure” Anglo-Saxon men & which has done in the past, effective & distinguished work in the U.S.—does this not count for anything? Does the 1/4 or 1/8 of “pure” Negro blood in my veins count for all? I believe it (the Negro blood) counts & counts to my advantage—though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliations & sorrow—unlimited “kicks” & “cuffs” but that it is the source of all my talents (if I have any) I do not believe, any more than I believe it all comes from my English ancestors.

I suppose according to the distorted way things are seen in the States my curly blond curly-headed little boy would be a “negro.”[5]

Tanner’s statement “I believe it (the Negro blood) counts & counts to my advantage” has been interpreted as “clear confirmation of his [Tanner’s] pride in his own roots.”[6] When this letter was cited in the Philadelphia catalogue, however, the transcription contained a significant mistake. Instead of a period—”Now am I a Negro.”—Tanner actually placed a question mark at the end of that sentence: “Now am I a Negro?” This one mark completely changes the meaning of Tanner’s reply. Whereas he did not discount his African American blood, he emphasized that he is more white than black: three-quarters white, perhaps as little as one-eighth “pure” Negro. Furthermore, according to Tanner, neither his whiteness nor his blackness accounted for his talent.

The phrase “Now am I a Negro?” is profound evidence that Tanner understood himself to be, by virtue of genealogy and self-definition and not according to the “distorted way things are seen in the States,” not black. It was, he had come to conclude, a matter open to discussion. Yes, his African American blood counted, but again in his words, did the three-quarters of his English blood “not count for anything?”…

Read the entire article here.

Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix

Lynne Rienner Publishers
October 2010
325 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58826-751-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58826-776-4

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Is postraciality just around the corner? How realistic are the often-heard pronouncements that mixed-race identity is leading the United States to its postracial future? In his provocative analysis, Rainier Spencer illuminates the assumptions that multiracial ideology in fact shares with concepts of both white supremacy and antiblackness.

Spencer links the mulatto past with the mulatto present in order to plumb the contours of the nation’s mulatto future. He argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• THE MULATTO PAST
  • The Mixed-Race Background
  • Of Tragic Mulattoes and Marginal Men
  • Mulatto Writers on Marginality
  • Imitations of Life
  • Rejecting a Shared Past
• THE MULATTO PRESENT
  • Postraciality, Multiraciality, and Antiblackness
  • Resurrecting Old Myths of Mulatto Marginality
  • The False Promise of Racial Bridging
  • Assessing the New Millennium Marginal Man
• THE MULATTO FUTURE
  • Whither Multiracial Militancy? Conserving the Racial Order
  • Mulatto (and White) Writers on Deconstructing Race
  • Beyond Generation Mix

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World by John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris (review)

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 4, April 2013
pages 532-533
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0017

James Sidbury, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Rice University

John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, eds., Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007)

This anthology of six essays on the complicated and sometimes surprising nature of black and white racial identities in the Atlantic region prior to the age of emancipation grew out of the 2007 Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington. The collection begins with an introductory essay in which Franklin W. Knight provides a broad and insightful overview of the meanings of race in different parts of the Americas, both historically and today. That is followed by four case studies that range from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil. The volume closes with an essay by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard that traces a family’s odyssey as they moved from colonial Saint-Domingue to Cuba, then to Louisiana, then to Europe, and then back to Louisiana, before finally returning to Europe. The other essays do not touch on as many locales, but they match Scott and Hébrard in their complex portrayals of the ways various black and white people in the Americas conceived of racial difference and the ways in which people of African descent worked within those conceptions to build their lives.

Two case studies explore Anglo-American racial thought. Rebecca Goetz, taking a fresh look at seventeenth-century Virginia, argues that the Englishmen who settled there came to believe that Africans and Indians lacked the capacity for true Christian belief, and whites used this belief to explain enslaving and dispossessing them. “By questioning the ability of Africans to become Christian, settlers defined both their own religious and cultural identity” and that of their racial others (p. 65). Trevor Burnard explores the demands of Anglo-Caribbeans to establish their standing as good and respectable Englishmen. As previous scholars have noted, they failed, but Burnard argues that their failure has less to do with the libertinage for which they were famous (there being metropolitans who openly sympathized with libertine values) than with their admitted attraction to African women. Those in the metropole “suspected that white West Indians’ constant intercourse with Africans . . . was turning them from ‘proper’ white people into black people” (p. 79), a perception exacerbated by the belief that white women in the islands behaved too much like black women. “Whiteness was endangered by the dereliction of gender rules” (p. 84).

The other case studies center on people of African descent. John Garrigus digs beneath the myths that have surrounded Vincent Ogé, the homme de couleur who was tortured and executed in Saint-Domingue for allegedly trying to foment a rebellion prior to the 1791 uprising in the northern plain. Garrigus upends the received narrative of this famous incident, showing that Ogé probably did not want to lead a prolonged uprising, but that he sought instead to rally the free colored militia to take advantage of the ties between militia service and citizenship that were emerging in the metropole. Sidney Chalhoub shows how Brazilian planters used the 1831 law that putatively prohibited the Atlantic slave trade to their own advantage, creating a system in which they could easily seize and enslave free black Brazilians. But black Brazilians also used the law and assumptions of “natural” black slavery that emerged out of it to avoid military service, seek less brutal masters, and finally, after 1851, to contest slavery. Neither the law itself nor the legal regime that arose out of its evasion operated in a simple or straightforward manner. Scott and Hébrard provide an overview of the complicated transatlantic genealogy that they have reconstructed for the children of “Rosalie of the Poulard Nation,” an enslaved African who achieved freedom in southern Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Her grandson became a Reconstruction-era Louisiana legislator and fought for racial and gender equality. That battle was rooted in his family’s history.

These essays, as Franklin Knight points out, underscore that the development of racial identities in the Americas was “a complicated process that varied according to time, place, and circumstances,” an understanding that helps to explain…