Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Ms. [Heather] Curry thinks Mr. Obama identifying as African-American could be confusing to mixed-race children, making them feel they have to choose or making them think, “If Obama says he’s black, does this mean I’m black?” She thinks biracial people shouldn’t choose one race over the other because they are both.
“I’m biracial,” she says. “I will fight somebody who calls me black.”
Vershawn Young, Associate Professor of English University of Kentucky
Daniel Sharfstein’sThe Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’sThe Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal analysis (Sharfstein is a legal scholar), part ethnographic study, it is a wholly gripping and exquisitely written narrative that tracks the racial passing of three black families over several centuries, leading us right up to their living “white” descendents today. You will certainly learn a lot about the history of race in the United States from The Invisible Line and, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down.
Tickets to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial were a hot item in the spring of 1922. Tens of thousands of people converged on the Mall for a day of celebration that included parades, music, and speeches by President Warren Harding and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, under whose presidency the memorial had been initiated.
One of the better-known black Washingtonians on hand that sunny Memorial Day was Whitefield McKinlay, former collector of customs at Georgetown and real estate manager to many of the city’s light-skinned mulatto elite. Nearing his seventieth birthday, McKinlay had lived through the best and the worst of what the post–Civil War world had to offer people of color. He had enrolled in the University of South Carolina during the heady days of Reconstruction and then been expelled when the Democrats rose to power there and created a particularly virulent form of the Jim Crow state. He had seen black politicians swept into office by newly enfranchised black voters and swept out again when the franchise was revoked.
Through this same process, Washington, D.C., had been transformed from what one of McKinlay’s more prominent real estate clients had termed “The Colored Man’s Paradise”—a place of considerable freedom and opportunity—into what the historian David Levering Lewis aptly describes as a “purgatory,” where Negroes were barred from hotels and restaurants, driven from federal jobs, and generally persecuted by Southerners in Congress who seemed intent on erasing the colored presence from the city. Though he does not deal at length with McKinlay, Daniel Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt, brings this part of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Negro society vividly to life in his authoritative and elegantly written The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White…
Clarence Walker is recognised as one of the leading historians of American race relations, and is noted for his advocacy of critical historical analysis of race relations and discourses as a way of understanding the present. Walker has written widely on issues relating to black American history, including five books covering variously race and politics (2009), race and the national imaginary (2010); Afrocentrism and discourses of black Africanism (2001, 1999) and the history of nineteenth century black religion (1982).
Introduction
Walker’s most recent work, with Gregory Smithers, explores the emergence of discourses of post-raciality during the 2008 United States election campaign (Walker and Smithers 2009) where Walker argued that the historical superficiality of journalism exacerbates racial tensions rather than creating greater cultural understanding on racial issues (2009, p. 39). In this interview, he discusses the applicability of what he describes as reactionary discourses (that of post-raciality, colour blindness and colour neutrality) in the context of shifting media usage and tensions arising from perceived challenges to the dominant, white-centred national imaginary.
The critique of white-centred accounts of history has been central to Walker’s recent work, and was the subject of his compelling book Mongrel Nation (2010), in which he argues for the need to recognise the interracial founding of the United States. The book contextualises the controversy surrounding 1990s claims that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, had one or more children in an interracial relationship with a slave girl called Sally Heming. These accounts were refuted heatedly by segments of academia who pointed to Jefferson’s documented concern about the dangers of amalgamation as an indication of the unlikely nature of his having an interracial affair. Walker argues persuasively and with historical force that such refutations need to be contextualised as reactionary discourses within a history of white-centred historicising and imagining of the national identity in the United States…
PLATFORM: The idea that American society is post-racial gained renewed ascendancy with Barack Obama’s election as the first (self-identifying) black President of the United States. However, narratives of post-race have been circulating in the US since the Civil Rights Act (1964). Can you elaborate on the nuances between narratives such as post-raciality, colour-blindness and race neutrality as a basis for informing analysis of their presence in political and media debates over the past two years?
Clarence Walker: In my view these are all reactionary movements. They are constructed around an attempt to efface race as a site of conflict in the American past and present. To say that one is colour-blind rather than colour-conscious is to say that you see something in someone that you don’t want to see, that is their colour. It’s also to say that you think that these issues are somewhat superficial and that if we want to wish them away we can. You can see this in the whole construction of Asians as some kind of model minority here because they’re successful academically and economically, at least in some sectors of the population. You can also see it in the hysteria over immigration with the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people over recent years.
It is the case in America that most white people do not want to talk about race. They prefer to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has effaced the racial problem, and that if there is a racial problem here it is because black people are basically angry or have refused to accept this new reality in which race is no longer a problem. But if race is no longer a problem, then why are there so many young black men between the ages of 18 and 25 including Mexicans also in American prisons? They constitute approximately one and a half million of two million people in American prisons.
Yet the Obama election was very much a racial election, despite these discourses of post-raciality. It was racial in the sense that it required white people to overcome their historical animosity towards the idea of a successful black candidate. I tend to think that up until the leaking to the media of the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as Gregory Smithers and I discuss in The Preacher and The Politician, there was little attention to the fact on the part of many white Americans that Barack Obama was black. In the case of black Americans there was great suspicion of him because he was not associated with the two historically defining moments of black American history, one being of course the question of slavery and Jim Crow, the other being the Civil Rights Movement. It was only when Jeremiah Wright’s comments were leaked and it came out that Obama was associated with this Church which was part of a Christian black nationalist movement, a particular congregation that was Afro-centric and black nationalist, that attention started to be paid to the fact that Obama was black. This led to speculation about whether Obama therefore might have a subtext of black militancy that he wasn’t talking about. This was one of the signature moments in terms of race becoming part of the election debate.
The Obama presidency has if not reignited the other being the issues about race and colour then certainly shown that they haven’t gone away. In many ways the emergence of this black man as the President of the United States is comparable to the emergence of prominent Jews in France and Germany and the political and cultural life of those countries in the nineteenth century. There were elements in those societies who were opposed to Jewish civil and political equality just as there are elements in this country who feared the election of Obama or any black person as the President of the United States.
The discourse of post-racialism which emerged in relation to the 2008 campaign was itself really a product of the chattering classes, by that I mean the media commentators and academics who talked about the ‘Obama moment’ as the post-racial moment. For example, I teach a course called the History of Race in America here at the University of California and I have just finished teaching 80 undergraduates. I have talked about this subject in the way I have done for the 37 years of my career in that I don’t mince words and I am very direct about what I want to say. Many of my students find this very disturbing because their views have been shaped by the media and some of them were very resistant to the notion that this in fact was not a post-racial society because we had a black president and that because he was of mixed race nobody talked about the fact that he had a white mother. I said to my students, “How would his history have been different if his mother was black and his father white rather than the other way around?” It had never occurred to them that this would have created a different historical narrative and a different historical actor, and one whom many white people in this country would never have voted for because his cultural experience rather than being that of a white working class family would have been that of a black family…
PLATFORM: I’d like to return to a consistent theme in your work, that of the argument that a critical appraisal of historiography is vital in understanding contemporary debates and discourses on race. In Mongrel Nation you particularly emphasised the resistance of historians and others to the notion of an interracial founding of America rather than the dominant constructions of whiteness that have underpinned renderings of history in the US. This was in relation to claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children in an interracial relationship with Sally Hemings. How can this historical perspective inform our understanding of the role of discourses such as post-racialism?
CW: In the national imaginary up until recently the United States was historically imagined by historians as purely a white nation. This is changing with the work of the very distinguished historian Annette Gordon Reed and others, as well as in my work, where you see a rethinking of the American past that is more in line with what the country was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what it is like today. The resistance to this arises out of the fact that it is very hard for some people, older people in particular, to think of the United States as anything other than ‘whiteland’ or ‘whitetopia’ and the fact that they refuse to come to grips with this. You see this most clearly in their hostility to Barack Obama. His election is something that is contrary to fact. If this is a white nation then what is it doing with a “coloured” president? And if this is a white nation, then what does it mean for the future? It means that we will have an Asian president, it means that we may even have a Muslim president, we may even have a woman president, and I hope we do. It’s not just that every generation writes history according to its own desires but that there has to be a recognition in the United States that although it was the product of white colonial settlers that the country did not remain white very long…
Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies DePaul University
Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Arizona State University, Tempe
The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950.
Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the son of an Abyssinian slave, was hailed as a musical prodigy in the eighteenth century. Taught by Haydn, his appearance at the court in Windsor to play in front of George III led to his subsequent ‘adoption’ by the Prince Regent. Friends with Beethoven—Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata and they gave the first performance together—his life offers a powerful symbolism for the creation and establishment of a black British community which has its roots in the 18th century importation and migration of slaves and ex-slaves.
Professor Mike Phillips is the librettist for the newly-commissioned opera, Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, to be given its premier as a part of the City of London Festival on the 5th of July. He will be discussing the role of black musicians in British culture in the two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade act.
I must begin by making it clear that I am not an academic researcher or an expert on slavery or an expert on the culture and customs of the Caribbean or Africa, and I have not spent many years in the British Library digging up obscure facts about this topic. So I am not going to get into arcane disputes about the precise number of black musicians who lived in Southwark or how often they did their laundry! But I have read a considerable amount about the topic. I am a novelist and a curator and I have written an exhausting number of words about the history of black people in Britain. This is not a talk about urban rioting or reggae or calypso or gospel music or jazz, although these forms dominate the experience of recent years. I am telling you this partly because I am going to end at the end of the 19th Century, because I only have an hour, and if I got on to the 20th Century, I would be here all night! But in fact, because of the subject of the new opera Bridgetower, a Fable of 1807, and because in general this part of the City of London Festival has focused on the 18th Century and the early 19th Century, I will be dealing roughly with those years.
The other point is that, in general, we tend to talk about black people in Britain, or about the multiracial nature of the population, as if it was an exclusively 20th Century phenomenon. We talk about the respective cultures as if they existed behind barriers, and we talk as if the colour of people’s skins defines their cultural prospects and abilities, a tendency which is an exact match for the strictures of 18th Century racial science, with its appalling attempts to categorise human beings in line with a preordained network of characteristics.
Even now, in this country, young black musicians still face a series of nudges in the direction of what everyone will describe as ‘their culture’, meaning steel bands and rapping. Young black musicians who lean towards classical forms will be more or less guaranteed a difficult time—it would be easier if they wanted to do percussion. Historically, that has meant that, by and large, black musicians in Europe have been written out of the narrative of the very landscape that they helped to shape, and we find ourselves obliged to rediscover figures like the Chevalier de Saint-George or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—people who were household names in their own time.
In that context, one of the most illuminating and reassuring aspects of looking at the lives of black cultural figures in Britain and Europe is that if you go back between the 16th Century and the 20th Century, you encounter black artists, poets, novelists and musicians who had no problems nor inhibitions in engaging in the cultural environment in which they found themselves. In the process, they tended to affect the culture in which they lived in various specific ways.
I mentioned the 19th Century, but as far back as 1505 we have an African drummer working for James IV in Edinburgh, arranging a dance with dancers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday festivities. Black musicians are repeatedly mentioned in pageants, fairs and at least one tournament from the 16th Century onwards.
If you come to the 18th Century, they’re relatively well-known—black musicians like Cato, who ended up as a head gamekeeper to the Prince of Wales around about 1740, and who was reputed to blow the best French horn and trumpet in his time. In the 18th Century, Londoners were already dancing in what were called black hops, where 12 pence would get you admission…
…But I will go on to talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. Bridgetower is an interesting person, not simply because he was born in the Esterhazy household; not simply because he was black; not because he was a child protégé, but all those things together, at the time when he arrived in Britain and during his career, had a particular kind of significance…
Read the lecture here.
Download the video (very large! 330 MB).
Download the audio (56.5 MB).
In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Arizona Humanities Council is proud to present Rita Dove as the keynote speaker for the 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture. Rita Dove will share poems from her most recent book, Sonata Mulattica, about a young mulatto violinist’s encounters with Beethoven.
Discussing the research that went into the book, she will reveal how she came to be uniquely suited to the task of rescuing the mixed race violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower from the shadows of history, and how history comes alive through art.
Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. In 1996, President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal. From 1981 to 1989, Rita Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. She currently is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.
I always find lectures by visiting art historians fascinating. Looking at works of art in historical context, examining the details, and hearing the backstories leaves me hungry to learn more. Such was the case on Wednesday, November 2 when I attended a lecture by Jo-Ann Morgan describing cultural history from the 19th century…
…Morgan’s lecture was titled “From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper: Mulatto Women in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture.” “Mulatto” isn’t a word heard often these days, and is defined as, “the first general offspring of a Black and White parent; or, an individual with both White and Black ancestors. Generally, Mulattoes are light-skinned, though dark enough to be excluded from the White race.”
“Maggie the Ripper” is Margaret Garner, a 23-year-old enslaved Black woman in pre-Civil War America. She and her family had escaped in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but were captured. When she was apprehended, she had cut the throat of her youngest daughter, and was attempting to kill her other children and presumably herself, rather than be returned to slavery. Margaret Garner’s defense attorney moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, in order to get a trial in a free state as well as to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law as well…
Garner was described in newspapers as mulatto with “white blood,” and “delicate” and “intelligent” eyes. By the time Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907), son of a slaveholder, and former Confederate soldier, chose, in 1867, to paint the famous slave fugitive, Garner’s case had all but faded from memory, but perceptions of mixed-race women had changed markedly from gentle, light-skinned madonnas, often painted cradling a babe and wearing a shawl draped about them, reminiscent of images of Mary (as shown in the painting, “The Last Slave Auction in St. Louis”). Gone were Garner’s delicate features, and instead, the frantic woman has the face of a cornered animal, teeth bared and holding a knife dripping with blood, while her dead daughter lay at her feet.
In her lecture, Morgan reminded the audience that prior to the Civil War, Black and Mulatto women were considered nothing more than breeding stock, and the children they bore, whether Black or mixed-race, were little more than property to be sold for profit. After the War, as abolition spread across the country, the same women and children were a guilty reminder of the indiscretion of slave owners, and the image of Mulatto women began to change…
RICHMOND— Richmond’s famous Hollywood Cemetery serves as the final resting place of presidents, statesmen and generals.
Few have had the impact of Dr. Walter Plecker. His stormy legacy continues today, 150 years after his birth.
“My parents always made sure we knew the story of what Walter Plecker had done and how it had affected our people,” said Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance For Life.
“Plecker was a menace to Virginia Indians over many years,” said Stephen R. Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “My mom and dad, for instance, had to go to Washington DC in 1935 to get married as Indians. It was illegal to do so in Virginia under penalty of up to a year in jail.”
“Dr. Plecker was convinced that there was a need to purify the white race,” said Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and formerly a eugenics expert at the University of Virginia. “He thought that he was preserving the Commonwealth of Virginia, that he was maintaining the United States of America and, most importantly to him, that he was protecting the white race.”
For 34 years, starting in 1912, Dr. Plecker served as the director of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, carefully compiling birth, death and marriage records.
For Plecker, a native of Augusta County, there were only two races: white and non-white. Anyone who had what he thought was one drop of other than white blood was listed as “colored.” They were mongrels, in his view.
Plecker was a complex man who saved the lives of countless babies, including those of blacks and Indians, with updated birthing and midwife techniques, along with simple, homemade incubators for premature babies, according to historic profiles.
He was relentless. With great energy he compiled lists and wrote letters chastising whites who applied for marriage licenses with those Plecker thought were impure. Those letters are part of the extensive correspondence that are part of the vast Plecker record.
“There’s no question that Plecker was incredibly aggressive using the few prerogatives the law gave him to register people,” Lombardo said. “He used those prerogatives really to threaten people, to coerce them… Dr. Plecker once boasted that he had a list of people, by race, that rivaled the list that was kept by Hitler of the Jews.”
If he even just suspected someone had any African-American blood, they would go on his mongrel list.
Virginia’s Native Americans particularly felt his wrath. He was certain the tribes had interbred with blacks. “Like rats, when you’re not watching, they’ve been sneaking in their birth certificates though their own midwives,” Plecker wrote.
“We couldn’t claim we were Indian, it was against the law to say we were Indian,” said Kenneth Branham, chief of the Monacan Tribe. “What do we claim? We’re not black. And we’re not white.”
“That whole idea that you’re not what you believe yourself to be,” said Sharon Bryant, the newly elected Monacan chief. “That an entire community would tell you that, it becomes very oppressive to the people.”
“Whole groups of people who formerly were recognized among the tribes of Virginia simply disappeared from the records,” Lombardo said. “They were no longer considered to be Native Americans or Indians as they were called. Their children were not recognized as members of the tribes, and they’re living with that legacy right now.”
Plecker and his many supporters believed not only that the races should never intermarry, they shouldn’t even mingle. Strict segregation would last for generations.
Blacks had to have their own schools and neighborhoods. So did Indians…
…In 1924, at Plecker’s urging and with the support of many Virginians, the General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which narrowly defined race and made it illegal to for whites to marry anyone of any other race. Plecker wrote to the governors of the rest of the states, urging them to pass similar laws to save the white race.
Also, that year, Lombardo said, “there’s a sterilization law that’s passed in Virginia, upheld later in the United States Supreme Court, allowing some 60,000-plus people to be sterilized in institutions in 32 states all over the country.”
There was also a strict immigration law passed then.
The Racial Integrity Act stood until 1967, when the Loving case about an interracial couple led to a Supreme Court reversal.
But the damage to Virginia’s Indian tribes continues. There are more than 560 federally recognized Indian tribes in the country. But none of Virginia’s tribes, the ones that helped the settlers survive, have that crucial recognition that gives them, in essence, sovereign status and entitles them to nation-building assistance.
The U.S. Department of the Interior requires that tribes be able to show an unbroken bloodline. And Walter Plecker carved a hole – decades long – in their heritage…
At the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of Chinese men made their way to the northern Mexican border state of Sonora to work and live. The ties—and families—these Mexicans and Chinese created during led to the formation of a new cultural identity: Chinese Mexican. During the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, anti-Chinese sentiment ultimately led to mass expulsion of these people. Julia María Schiavone Camacho follows the community through the mid-twentieth century, across borders and oceans, to show how they fought for their place as Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad.
Tracing transnational geography, Schiavone Camacho explores how these men and women developed a strong sense of Mexican national identity while living abroadin the United States, briefly, and then in southeast Asia where they created a hybrid community and taught their children about the Mexican homeland. Schiavone Camacho also addresses how Mexican women challenged their legal status after being stripped of Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese men. After repatriation in the 1930s-1960s, Chinese Mexican men and women, who had left Mexico with strong regional identities, now claimed national cultural belonging and Mexican identity in ways they had not before.
In the years following Cuba’s independence, nationalists aimed to transcend racial categories in order to create a unified polity, yet racial and cultural heterogeneity posed continual challenges to these liberal notions of citizenship. Alejandra Bronfman traces the formation of Cuba’s multiracial legal and political order in the early Republic by exploring the responses of social scientists, such as Fernando Ortiz and Israel Castellanos, and black and mulatto activists, including Gustavo Urrutia and Nicolás Guillén, to the paradoxes of modern nationhood.
Law, science, and the social sciences—which, during this era, enjoyed growing status in Cuba as well as in many other countries—played central roles in producing knowledge and shaping social categories in postindependence Cuba. Anthropologists, criminologists, and eugenicists embarked on projects intended to employ the tools of science to rid Cuba of the last vestiges of a colonial past. Meanwhile, the legal arena created both new freedoms and new modes of repression. Black and mulatto intellectuals and activists, working to ensure that citizenship offered concrete advantages rather than empty promises, appropriated changing social scientific and legal categories and turned them to their own uses. In the midst of several decades of intermittent racial violence and expanding social and political mobilization by Cubans of African descent, debates among intellectuals and activists, state officials, and legislators transformed not only understandings of race, but also the terms of citizenship for all Cubans.
