Mixed Race Studies

The black experience in postwar Germany

University of Connecticut
Honors Scholar Program
2012-05-06
36 pages

Jamie Christopher Morris

This paper endeavors to find the extent of anti-black racism in various sectors of German society following World War Two through an examination of primary sources and secondary scholarship. While some Germans, often women, tolerated and even loved African-American soldiers, many German men actively sought to keep black GIs out of their communities, encouraged by white GIs. Afro-German children were viewed as a huge and shameful problem to be dealt with en masse by the government. The development of German anti-black racism is interesting to track how the German people shifted from Nazi attitudes towards Americanized ones.

Introduction

In the late 1940s a young and frightened German girl believed that the African-American soldiers marching through her town had tails hidden in their trousers, a rumor that had been told to her by a passing white soldier. A decade later that girl was dating one of those same black GIs, and had in fact approached him first to get his attention. She may have been recalling the fact that it was the black soldiers who had treated her the best as a child, giving her gifts and making sure she was clean, or she may have simply desired an American boyfriend in the hopes that he would lavish her with his comparatively rich lifestyle. The girl’s attitude reflects that of many Germans towards blacks in the late 1940s and 1950s. Public opinion of black soldiers grew locally in the towns that hosted them, driven in no small part by their generosity and kindness compared to that of white GIs, but their exotic appearance and unique American outlook also attracted attention and praise.

Of course there was also some strong resistance to the stationing of black American soldiers in occupied Germany. Vestiges of the National Socialist ideology of racial purity remained in many Germans’ thoughts, if not always in their speech and actions, as well as the traditional prejudice against anything different from themselves that clung still to most Europeans. But because of the intense Nazi focus on race and cleansing, and the uncovering of the Nazi atrocities, Germany was forced into a unique position of having to prove its mended ways; as historian Heide Fehrenbach notes, “The postwar logic of race that emerged in Germany was beholden to an internationally enforced injunction that Germans differentiate their polity and policies from the Nazi predecessor.” Thus over the 1950s the language of “race” all but disappeared in Germany, although prejudices were often just as strong as previously. These hatreds, however, were turned towards the new and highly visible group of racial “others”: blacks.3 Germans maintained a unique outlook towards this new racial group, convincing themselves that they were not racist but proving hostile towards blacks and those who associated with them. An overwhelmingly conservative system of values warred with the Germans’ vehement denial of the feelings of the past to create a uniquely hostile yet also inviting environment for African-Americans…

Read the entire thesis here.

Discovery of first black Harvard grad’s papers leads to as many questions as answers

Cable News Network (CNN)
2012-03-14

Stephanie Siek

(CNN) – The story of Richard Theodore Greener is a book with many blank pages. The first African-American to graduate from Harvard University in 1870, he was one of the foremost black thinkers of his time, rising to prominence between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois and praised by both. Greener was the dean of Howard University’s law school, a diplomat and also the University of South Carolina’s first black professor and head librarian.

The recent discovery of some of Greener’s papers in Chicago could fill in some of those pages. But the ironies of his life remain.

One daughter of this book-loving man and advocate for racial equality would go on to become the most respected librarian of her era and an expert on medieval illuminated manuscripts—but not as a woman of color. Belle Marian Greener, who was born to Greener and his first wife, Genevieve Ida Fleet, passed for white. Even lighter-skinned than her two light-skinned African-American parents, she changed her name to Belle da Costa Greene to reflect a fabricated Portuguese ancestry that would explain her complexion.

Portuguese ancestry that would explain her complexion.

After separating from Fleet, Greener accepted consular appointments in Bombay (now Mumbai), India and Vladivostok, Siberia, but neither Fleet nor their children joined him. Da Costa Greene burned most of her personal papers before her death in 1950, and except for a possible visit with her father after his retirement in Chicago, the degree to which she and Greener kept in contact is a mystery.

While working as an American consular official in Vladivostok in 1898, Greener began a relationship with a Japanese woman, Mishi Kawashima, with whom he had a daughter and two sons. He then had to leave them behind in Vladivostok in 1906, when he was the victim of a rumor campaign that resulted in his retirement.

It’s possible that racism played a role in his reasons for leaving the post, said Michael Mounter, a historian and research librarian at the University of South Carolina who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greener. Among the rumors flying at the time, Mounter said, were that he “was drinking too much and had a Japanese mistress.”

“You had a group of white Americans living in Vladivostok and he originally went to social events with them,” said Mounter.  “He did not identify himself specifically as being black. He didn’t want to, he didn’t see the point in it.”

“One might say, ‘Well, he was passing for white.’ Others might say he just wanted to be judged on his own merits,” said Mounter…

Read the entire article here.

‘Brown babies’ long search for family, identity

Indianapolis Recorder
2011-11-23

Stephanie Siek

(CNN) — Daniel Cardwell’s obsession consumed three decades of his life and $250,000 of his money, he estimates. His energy has been devoted to answering one basic question: “Who am I?”

Cardwell was a “brown baby”—one of thousands of children born to African-American GIs and white German women in the years after World War II. Inter-racial relationships still weren’t common or accepted among most in the United States or Germany, and they weren’t supported by the military brass, either.

Couples were often split apart by disapproving military officers. Their children were deemed “mischlingskinder”—a derogatory term for mixed race children. With fathers forced to move way, the single mothers of the African-American babies struggled to find support in a mostly white Germany and were encouraged to give their kids up.

Thousands of the children born from the inter-racial relationships were put up for adoption and placed in homes with African-American military families in the United States or Germany. Images of black, German-speaking toddlers with their adoptive American families were splashed across the pages of Jet and Ebony magazines and African-American newspapers.

Their long-forgotten stories have recently been shared in new films, “Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story,” which was released last summer and “Brown Babies: Germany’s Lost Children,” which aired on German television this fall…

…For the thousands of children who are now adults and seeking their biological families, time is running out. Henriette Cain, a “brown baby,” from Rockford, Illinois, knows this all too well.

“People’s mothers are passing away, their fathers are passing away, and people are starting to wonder who they are,” Cain said from her home. “Now even we are passing away, and it’s a story that needs to be told.”

Since beginning her search in the 1970s, the 59-year-old retiree has been fortunate — she located and met her biological sister, who was living in Darmstadt, Germany, and her biological mother, who had married a white U.S. soldier and moved to Virginia. The family now enjoys a close relationship. She tracked down her biological father, as well, but he died before they could meet…

Read the entire article here.

When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race

The New York Times
2012-09-08

Brent Staples

My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given an earful about our place in 19th-century Virginia — and specifically about Marshall’s white grandfather, a member of a slaveholding family who fathered at least one child with my great-great-grandmother, Somerville Staples.

Stories like this are typical among African-Americans who have roots in the slave-era South and who have always spoken candidly about themselves and their relationships with slaveholding forebears. In some cases, the Negro second families carried the names of their masters/fathers into Emancipation and settled in the same areas.

This was inconvenient for the white progenitors and their families, who feared the taint of blackness so much that they often declined to acknowledge or speak to their darker relatives on the street. In nullifying these family connections, they embraced the fiction of racial purity that has dominated how white Americans see themselves for hundreds of years…

Read the entire article here.

Alexander Saxton, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 93

The New York Times
2012-09-01

Paul Vitello

Alexander Saxton, who would go on to become a prominent historian of race in America, summed himself up in a blurb on the dust jacket of his first novel, “Grand Crossing,” published when he was 24.

“At various times,” he said, he had worked as “a harvest hand, construction gang laborer, engine-wiper, freight brakeman, architectural apprentice, assistant to the assistant editor” of a union newspaper, railroad switchman and columnist for The Daily Worker.

Unmentioned were his upbringing on the East Side of Manhattan in a household where Thornton Wilder and Aldous Huxley were frequent dinner guests, and his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard.

But in his biographical blurb, the young Mr. Saxton accomplished the first of many self-transformations. They included passage from upper-income childhood to working-class adulthood; from Harvard student to Chicago laborer; from novelist to union organizer and Socialist; from activist to academic…

…His contributions as a cultural historian are considered his most enduring.

Mr. Saxton’s first historical book, “The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California,” became a landmark of labor history, describing how 19th- and 20th-century labor unions used racism against Chinese immigrants as a tool for unifying and organizing white union members.

“It challenged one of the foundational stories of the labor movement,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “Instead of the story of solidarity and democracy usually told, Saxton showed how racism was one of labor’s most important organizing tools.”

The critical success of the book helped Mr. Saxton establish one of the first Asian-American studies program in the United States at U.C.L.A. in the early 1970s. 

His 1975 paper “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” [March 1975] tracing the links between blackface minstrelsy and the ideology of white supremacy, is considered one of the early texts in black history studies; and a 1990 book, “The Rise and Fall of the White Republic,” is known as one of the foundations of “critical whiteness studies,” an academic field that examines the assumptions underlying “whiteness” as a racial designation and political organizing principle….

Read the entire obituary here.

Mulattos of St. Domingo

General Advertiser
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Wednesday, 1792-03-14 (Number 455)
Souce: Professor of History John Garrigus (University of Texas, Arlington)

Are the motley breed of landholders, gentlemen adventurers, parsimonious merchants, factors, clerks, managers, and plantation-overseers from Europe. The progenitors of this yellow tribe were generally persons who came out from France and other parts of Europe, to make fortunes rapidly, return, and spend them under their native skies. During their stay in this delightful island, the pursuits of avarice were not sufficiently powerful to restrain them wholly from more natural pursuits. No immediate objects of gratification presented but the enslaved African female, who was therefore adopted vice spousa, and while she planted sugar canes on the mountain, or attended a herd of goats in the valley, contributed to people the island with a progeny, who were neither European or African, and felt no attachment to either, further than the interest or the more immediate prospect of advantage dictated.

Natural affection had still some influence where united paternal fondness had been rendered extremely weak from the unequal condition of the progenitors. Mulattoes were generally excused from the labors of the field. They were housekeepers, and clerks; they were houseboys, and poultry men; they were waiters at tables and taverns: they were fishermen, cooks, and turnspits; they were even bound out to mechanical trades, and in the general everything in the line of domestic employment, except field slaves, who are reckoned one of the most degraded classes in the islands, and absolutely placed on a level with the mules that turn the cattle mills…

Read the entire article here.

The Dougla in Trinidad’s Consciousness

History in Action: Online Journal of The University of the West Indies (St. Augustine. Trinidad and Tobago) Dept. of History
Volume 2, Number 1 (April 2011)
7 pages
ISSN: 2221-7886

Feme Louanne Regis
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad is a complex multi-ethnic society where the two major ethnic groups – Africans and Indians – are in competition for power: economic, political and social. These contestations force the meeting and mixing of these two groups but militate against their merger. This is a reality that impacts significantly on the lives of their offspring the Dougla who are birthed into this complex social, cultural and linguistic situation and whose social position within this divide remain unclear and uncertain. Before 2011, Douglas were not designated in official censuses as a marginal ethnic community or even a biracial minority group leaving them free to declare themselves African, Indian or members of the umbrella categories Mixed and Other. Despite the steady increase in the number of people who define themselves as Douglas, their position in Trinidadian society remains ambivalent and indeterminate. This presentation maps the comparative invisibility of Douglas in Trinidadian society from the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries via an examination of social history and anthropology, creative writing, and popular culture.

Introduction

Douglas, the offspring of Indo-African unions, occupy an ambiguous position in Trinidadian society. Etymologically, the word Dougla is linked to dogla which is of India origin and is defined by Platts (1884, 534) as “a person of impure breed, a hybrid, a mongrel; a two-faced or deceitful person and a hypocrite.” In Bihar, Northern India, from where many Indian indentured labourers migrated to Trinidad, dogla still carries the meaning of a person of impure breed related specifically to the “progeny of inter-varna marriage, acquiring the connotation of ‘bastard’, meaning illegitimate son of a prostitute, only in a secondary sense” (Reddock 1994, 101). We do not know how and when the term Dougla became equated to the offspring of Indian-African unions in Trinidad but we may surmise that it originated in traditional Indian contempt for the darker-skinned (Brereton 1974, 24).

Recognition of Douglas

Wood (1968) does not recognise a Dougla presence in 19th century Trinidad. He trusts the official report of the Protector of the Immigrants that as late as 1871, 26 years after their arrival, “no single instance of co-habitation with a Negro existed among the 9,000 male and female indentured labourers” (1968, 138). He overlooks the 1876 testimony of John Morton, to the effect that “a few children are to be met with, born of Madras and Creole parents and some also of Madras and Chinese parents—the Madrasee being the mother” (Moore 1995, 238).

Ramesar (1994) accepts the reality of inter-racial sexual relations in the early twentieth century, but seems reluctant to acknowledge Africans as sexual partners for Indians and nowhere mentions the word Dougla. The Dougla presence is instead hidden in the generic term “Indian Creoles.” Examining the statistics testifying to Indian inter-racial sexual liaisons, Ramesar argues that such relationships happened more readily in Port of Spain and in Cedros than in central Trinidad, where the majority of Indian communities were located. Yet, the demographic evidence indicates African-Indian unions even in areas dominated by Indians (Harewood 1975).

According to Ramesar, the Indian fathers of mixed-race children were “probably westernized individuals who sought educated spouses.” She concedes, however, that “changed social relationships had also affected the lower levels in society” (146). Yet, the literary works of C.A. Thomasos (1933), C.L.R. James (1929; 1936), and Alfred Mendes (1935) demonstrate that inter-racial mixing was not necessarily inspired by social climbing. In these works, Douglas are presented as deracinated individuals engaged, as part of Black urban lower class, in the amoral struggle for survival.

In the 2005 feature address at the launch of the Indian Arrival Day Heritage Village, Elizabeth Rosabelle Sieusarran, a University of the West Indies lecturer, said:

In our quest for establishing unity among our people, it is imperative for us to note a rapidly increasing phenomenon of westernisation of the Indian community. This has resulted in the prevalence of inter-caste, inter-religious and inter-racial marriages. The Indian community has to decide how to handle the offspring of this significant group locally referred to as douglas. Do we accept them or ostracise them? Whatever course is adopted, the fragmentation of the Indian community must be avoided (Trinidad Express 16th May 2005, 5).

Sieusarran thus reduces the problems caused by westernisation to the fragmentation within the Indian community allegedly created by exogamy. She then ignores the progeny of many such relationships and targets Douglas as the source of that fragmentation. While acknowledging the organic connection of the Douglas to the Indian communities, Sieusarran indicates that Douglas are still perceived as a problem by some Indians even while they advocate co-existence in a multi-cultural society….

Read the entire article here.

Roots: Saint Lucia’s Hindu Legacy

Hinduism Today
October/November/December 2012

Gajanan Nataraj
Saint Lucia

I am a Saint Lucian citizen. I was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived briefly on the mainland (USA), but for the better part of 23 years I was raised on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I am roughly two-quarters Indian and two-quarters Negro–meaning both my parents were themselves of mixed heritage. This is common in Saint Lucia. We are called dougla–which comes from doogala (“two necks”), a demeaning label meaning mixed race or half-caste in Bhojpuri and Hindi. In Saint Lucia, the term is sometimes used affectionately, sometimes not so affectionately.

Though many on the island are of Indian heritage, I am one of the very few Hindus. I have a Hindu name, perform daily puja to Lord Ganesha and consider the cow a sacred creature. I believe in karma, dharma, reincarnation, the divinity of the Vedas and in the need for a satguru to guide my spiritual journey. Of all the Indian families who came to Saint Lucia from Kolkata as indentured workers in the 19th century, mine is one of the few to reclaim our Hindu heritage. In being Hindu, I am almost unique among the fifth generation of Indian immigrants. Even among my close relatives, almost all are Christians.

How did I come to be a Hindu in a land where Christianity reigns supreme, even among Indians? I attribute my discovery of this beautiful religion to the interplay of my soul’s natural calling and God’s blessing of being born to parents who are ardent seekers of spiritual truth. Indeed, my growth from non-religious, Christian-influenced spiritual confusion can only be credited to the marvelous journey of my parents…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kidd

University Press of Kentucky
1997
208 pages
On Demand paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0948-0

Wade Hall

In 1976, Kentucky state legislator Mae Street Kidd successfully sponsored a resolution ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was fitting that a black woman should initiate the state’s formal repudiation of slavery; that it was Mrs. Kidd was all the more appropriate. Born in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 1904 to a black mother and a white father, Kidd grew up to be a striking woman with fair skin and light hair. Sometimes accused of trying to pass for white in a segregated society, Kidd felt that she was doing the opposite—choosing to assert her black identity. Passing for Black is her story, in her own words, of how she lived in this racial limbo and the obstacles it presented. As a Kentucky woman of color during a pioneering period of minority and women’s rights, Kidd seized every opportunity to get ahead. She attended a black boarding academy after high school and went on to become a successful businesswoman in the insurance and cosmetic industries in a time when few women, black or white, were able to compete in a male-dominated society. She also served with the American Red Cross in England during World War II. It was not until she was in her sixties that she turned to politics, sitting for seventeen years in the Kentucky General Assembly—one of the few black women ever to do so—where she crusaded vigorously for housing rights. Her story—presented as oral history elicited and edited by Wade Hall—provides an important benchmark in African American and women’s studies and endures as a vital document in Kentucky history.

Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance

University of Toronto Press
October 2010
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781442641402
eBook ISBN: ISBN 9781442660083

Jean E. Feerick, Assistant Professor of English
Brown University

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.

Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Bloodwork
• 1. Blemished Bloodlines and The Faerie Queene, Book 2
• 2. Uncouth Milk and the Irish Wet Nurse
• 3. Cymbeline and Virginia’s British Climate
• 4. Passion and Degeneracy in Tragicomic Island Plays
• 5. High Spirits, Nature’s Ranks, and Ligon’s Ladies
• Coda: Beyond the Renaissance