Mixed Race Studies

Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation

Brown University
May 2009
268 pages

Marisela Jiménez Ramos

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

On January 31, 2006, the Associated Press reported that while remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city on the Yucatan peninsula, construction workers stumbled upon a sixteenth-century cemetery containing what seemed to be the oldest archeological evidence of African slavery in the Americas. The cemetery had been in use as early as the mid-sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. That same day, the New York Times published an article about the discovery that focused on the teeth that had been unearthed by archeologists. At least four of the 180 bodies that were recovered showed evidence of having come from West Africa, including the most telling fact that “some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.” In January of 2006 the evidence of early African slavery in New Spain (now Mexico) was finally making “big news” in the modern world. But, for the historians, archeologists, anthropologists, or cultural investigators who have dug through dusty colonial documents in many of Mexico’s archives or have mined the world histories and local memories of Mexico’s “third root,” the news that there had been Africans in Mexico was hardly news. Scholars have always known that Mexico, along with all of the other Spanish colonies, had a comprehensive fully actualized system of African slavery. Two days after the initial AP news release, Mexico City’s El Universal and La Reforma carried the story.  What these and subsequent news articles reveal is the prevalent and dominant discourse of mestizaje—defined as the mixture of Spanish and Indian elements—and the obscurity of Mexico’s African history.

In El Universal, the director of the project, Vera Tiesler from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, reported that “the most important thing is to create a consciousness that we [Mexicans] not only originate from Indians and Europeans, but that there is also a third root.” Tiesler also commented that the discovery was especially important for Blacks in the United States because it provides further evidence of their arrival to the New World.  Underlying the language of the “rediscovery” of Mexico’s ancient Black population is the dominant discourse of mestizaje—Mexico’s ideology of racial mixture and national identity.  A major feature of this ideology is that “the African, under no circumstance persevered as pure black, either biologically or culturally.” Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of Black Mexican studies, expressed the common attitude of Mexicans who believed that “the slaves who contributed to Mexico’s genetic make-up became so completely integrated into the process of mestizaje that it is now very difficult for the layman to distinguish the Negroid features of the present population as a whole.” Our current understanding of racial mixture in Mexico does not negate the fact that Blacks were present in that country. If the African presence and influence is not obvious, it is not any less important historically. Blacks in Mexico have “disappeared” as a separate racial/ethnic group, to the point that nothing Black or African is considered Mexican. Yet, what is lacking is a clear explanation for the “disappearance” of the contributions that Blacks have made to our current understanding of Mexican identity.

The story of those bones in Campeche can be brought to life with a better understanding of the development of Mexican national identity. In this work I focus on nineteenth-century discourses of race and their intersection with nation-building and the exclusion of Blackness from what would eventually be termed, “mestizaje.” Since my purpose is not so much to understand what Mexico’s national identity is (or was), as to understand how and why it came to exclude all things Black and African, I focus my research on the period between Independence in 1821 and the the Porfiriato (1876-1911) when nationalism and national identity became a state-sponsored project. Historians like Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo have claimed that the modern nationalist project in Mexico began with the period of the Porfiriato and culminated with the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)—an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet, even before the beginning of the Porfiriato, I argue, “Mexican” identity had already been defined to a large degree. The nineteenth century period marks the beginning of Mexico’s political and social liberation from Spanish rule, as well as the beginning of a self-conscious
process of nation-building…

My goal is to make clear the role of Blacks and Blackness in nineteenth-century Mexican discourses of nation and to document their contributions to the makeup of mestizaje. I focus on what Florencia Mallón calls “discursive transformation.” Prasenjit Duara explains, “the meanings of the nation are produced mainly through linguistic mechanisms.” In reality, Blacks “disappeared” through omission from nineteenth-century discourses of race and nation, a process I call the Black exception, a term that highlights how Blacks were exempt from Mexico’s understanding of its own racial makeup.

By looking into the role of Blackness, or negritud, in nineteenth-century discourses of nation I seek to formulate a new understanding of Mexico’s national identity, but primarily a new theoretical understanding of ethnic relations in the period after independence. I investigate the social and political processes that contributed to the eventual—but by no means inevitable—‘disappearance’ of Blacks and all things African from the national self-consciousness of modern Mexico. To be more precise, I provide answers to the following questions. In the absence of racial categories in post-independence Mexico how did the understanding of what it meant to be Black change for former Blacks and for non-Blacks? More importantly, how did these definitions fit within the evolving concept of “lo Mejicano”?

I argue that Mexico’s twentieth-century struggles for social and political development cannot be understood without examining the role that nineteenth-century racial ideologies played in the institutionalization of official and unofficial conceptions of citizenship and nation-building. I hope to show how the historical record may be mined for evidence of the conflicting ideologies determining the context of the roles that Blacks would play—or would not be allowed to play—in the new nation. In addition to a reconceptualization of the discourse of mestizaje, this research will open avenues to a rethinking of the contemporary identity of Mexicans, including a recovery of the (obscured) Black presence…

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Curriculum Vitae
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Blackness of Slavery: Race in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1821
• Chapter 2: Inventing Mexico: Race and the Discourse of Independence
• Chapter 3: Mexico Mestizo: Nation and the Discourse of Race
• Chapter 4: Freedom Across the Border: U.S. Fugitive Slave Migration and the Discourse of Mexican Racial Equality, 1821-1866
• Chapter 5: The Cultural Meaning of Blackness: The Strange But True Adventures of “La Mulata de Córdoba” and “El Negrito Poeta”
• Chapter 6: Yanga: Mexico’s First Revolutionary
• Conclusion: “Where Did The Blacks Go?”

Read the entire dissertation here.

Long Way Home: The Loving Story

Augusta Films
2010

Director and Producer: Nancy Buirski
Producer and Editor: Elisabeth Haviland James

Richard and Mildred Loving, Circa 1967

This documentary feature film, currently in production, tells the dramatic story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black and Cherokee woman married to a white man (against the law in 1958-Virginia) and of their famous anti-miscegenation case argued in the Supreme Court in 1967. Thrown into rat-infested jails and exiled from their hometown for 25 years, the Lovings fought back and changed history. Using rare archival footage, home movies, photographs, interviews with witnesses, friends and family, and poetic visual and narrative sequences, the documentary will build a complex portrait of the couple at the heart of marriage equality in this country. It will also do something rare in storytelling—look at the story itself as it has mutated over the years, with the understanding that history is only as reliable as those who tell it.

Both of the attorneys, Bernie Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, who represented Mildred and Richard Loving in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia have agreed to participate in the project as consultants and as on-camera interviews.  In addition, Peggy Loving Fortune and Sidney Jeter Loving, the surviving children of Mildred and Richard have agreed to be on-camera participants. This is notable because, like their mother, they have guarded their privacy and avoided media attention for most of their lives.

For more information, click here. To donate to the project, click here.

The Secret History of Race in the United States

The Yale Law Journal
Volume 112, Issue 6 (March 2003)
pages 1473-1509

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Associate Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

In the beginning, there was a man named Looney. George Looney’s world was Buchanan County, Virginia, a pocket of Appalachian hills and hollows that juts into Kentucky and West Virginia. In 1911, his place in this world was secure. Where lumber was the only industry in town, Looney owned a mill and a store. He had a thriving family. His home was near Looney’s Creek.

But Looney’s world was changing. Outsiders were moving to Appalachia to chop, saw, dynamite, and chisel the countryside. Among them were black people, never a common sight in Buchanan, “one of the whitest counties, not only in Virginia, but in the entire South.” The locals proved hostile to the newcomers. Although southwestern Virginia had an extremely small African-American population, more lynchings occurred there between 1880 and 1930 than in any other part of the state. The violence was most common in the more industrialized counties immediately to the east. Even so, in early 1893, after mobs lynched five blacks in neighboring Tazewell, vigilantes and rioters rode through Buchanan, declaring it “altogether a white county.”

About five years after the mob violence in Buchanan, a young man named George Spencer crossed the Kentucky line into Virginia. Over the next decade, he married a local woman, had six children, and settled near the Looneys. Spencer, a farmer, worked for Looney at times, and the families often ate together, stayed over at each other’s houses, and sent their children to the same schools. Their community was small; the local teacher was a third cousin to the Looneys and kin by marriage to the Spencers.

However, when Spencer’s brother was accused of killing Looney’s brother, the families stopped talking. And then Looney started talking, to just about anyone who would listen: “[The Spencers] are nothing but God damned negroes, and I can prove they are God damned negroes.” Adopting these words as a mantra, Looney—”thoroughly addicted to the abominable habit” of profanity—uttered them at the mill, at his store, at home, and in town. In the summer of 1911, his words flowed down the branches and forks and creeks wrinkling through Buchanan. Before the local school opened for the fall term, Looney approached his cousin, the teacher, told him to tell the Spencers that he called them “damned niggers,” and declared that he would take his children out of school. “They shan’t go with negroes,” he said.

Then Looney sharpened his attack. He traveled to nearby Johnson County, Kentucky. “[T]hrough strenuous efforts, involving costs and expenses,” Looney found men who knew Spencer’s grandfather—old men, on either side of eighty, who lived in places with names like Paintsville, Jennies Creek, Burnt Cabin, and Lick Fork, and knew Jordan Spencer, Sr., “[e]ver since the war, and before too.” These men remembered his thin lips, blue eyes, and “tolerably straight,” long red hair, quite possibly “painted,” with “a kind of a slick rim where his hat went.” One recalled that “a wild, drinking kind of a dissipated man” named Letcher Davis used to tell the Johnson County locals that Spencer had mixed blood, and others talked about nagging rumors that would pop up every now and then. Looney paid for a school official to accompany him on his expeditions. With affidavits in hand, Looney convinced the Rock Lick School District to expel Melvin Spencer from the third grade. George Spencer then sued Looney for slander, seeking damages of ten thousand dollars.

Spencer v. Looney was one of dozens of cases decided in the eras of slavery and segregation that hinged on the question of whether a plaintiff or defendant was white or black. During the past decade, legal historians have begun to excavate these bygone disputes, which involved wills, marriage and divorce, transportation, immigration and naturalization, and libel and slander. With few exceptions, two goals have motivated recent scholarship: proving that race is a social construction and showing how courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped build America’s racial infrastructure.

This Essay presents a more complex picture of race in the post-Reconstruction South in an attempt to develop a richer understanding of how the law of race worked. Cases that required a determination of a plaintiff’s or defendant’s racial identity provide rare glimpses into the private lives and worldviews of real people. Although contained within the conventions of briefs, legal opinions, and direct and cross examination, their voices vividly express a largely unexplored degree of self-consciousness about what race does and does not mean. Making sense of the private beliefs aired in courtrooms is an essential task of the legal history of race. Cases like Spencer v. Looney show people who exercised a surprising degree of tolerance in their everyday lives at a time of massive racial hysteria and who had a basic awareness that racial identity was something that could be disputed and creatively argued, at least in the courtroom.

After surveying the legal historiography, I explore what current scholars, with a few notable exceptions, have missed: that many of the historical actors understood that race is a social construction. For most legal historians, the actors in cases such as Spencer v. Looney—parties, lawyers, witnesses, judges, spectators, and contemporaneous commentators—have been useful only to the extent that their doings, presumably unconscious or unintentional, reveal inconsistencies about, and thus the socially constructed nature of, race. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, there was widespread discussion of the artificiality of the color line, in courtrooms, legal commentary, social science literature, journalism, and fiction. It is no exaggeration to say that at the height of Jim Crow, people—even and perhaps especially the most rabid of racists—understood what a legal fiction was.

At the root of at least some of this self-consciousness is a phenomenon in American social history that the law, as a forum where family secrets were uttered aloud, is uniquely positioned to reveal. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States shifted from an identity regime that recognized “mulattoes” as a distinct racial category to one that divided the world strictly into black and white. Although this transition has been generally regarded as a time when mulattoes were absorbed into a black world, it was also a time when many established themselves as white. That is to say, across the South at the turn of the twentieth century, ostensibly white people who were socially accepted as white had African ancestry.This racially porous status quo was at odds with the extreme and often violent politics of segregation. While the most paranoid ideologies of “racial integrity” sought to classify every person with any African ancestry as black, this “one-drop rule” had the broad potential to be destabilizing for the white South. If no one’s racial status was secure without an exhaustive genealogy, the governmental apparatus of segregation and white supremacy would be perpetually threatening to whites. Instead, statutory definitions of race reflected the status quo, defining as white those people who had as much as one-fourth or one-eighth “Negro blood.” Formalistic judicial enforcement of the color line preserved this status quo, making it difficult to prove that people who were accepted as white were in fact black and encouraging actions for damages such as Spencer v. Looney.

As a result, extreme segregationists sought to push the color line toward a one-drop rule by arguing that the more generous statutory definitions of race were absurd, illogical, and socially constructed—an ironic contrast to quite similar observations made by progressive scholars today. This complicated picture of race in the turn-of-the-century South has been absent from legal scholarship. At the heart of this Essay is an attempt to take race beyond conventional legal history and view cases about the color line as portals into a world of secret histories—whispered gossip, unstated understandings, and stories purposely forgotten.  

Read the entire article here.

Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 4, Fall 2009
pages 499-522
E-ISSN: 1534-1828, Print ISSN: 0095-182X

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Being part of and writing about the Lumbee community means that history always emerges into the present, offering both opportunities and challenges for my scholarship and my sense of belonging. I was born in Robeson County, North Carolina, a place that Lumbees refer to as “the Holy Land,” “God’s Country,” or, mostly, “home,” regardless of where they actually reside. My parents raised me two hours away in the city of Durham, making me an “urban Indian” (or as my cousins used to say, a “Durham rat”). I have a Lumbee family; both of my parents are Lumbees, and all of my relatives are Lumbees—I’m just a Lum, I’m Indian. This is how I talk about myself, using terms and categories of knowledge (like “home” and “Lum”) that have specific meanings to me and to other Lumbees but may mean nothing special to anyone else. Stories and places spring from these categories and become history.

I was drawn to researching and writing about my People’s history in part because the opportunity to tell our own story was too rare for me to pass up. Outsiders, people who do not belong to the group, have told our stories for us, often characterizing us as a “tri-racial isolate,” “black Indians,” or “multi-somethings.” Lumbees seem to have a particular reputation for multiracial ancestry. Perhaps our seemingly anomalous position in the South raises the question—as nonwhites, the argument goes, whites must have classed Lumbees socially with African Americans; therefore, Lumbees must have married African Americans extensively because they could not have married anyone who was white. At the heart of these arguments are two converging assumptions: one, that ancestry and cultural identity are consanguineous rather than subject to the changing contexts of human relations, and two, that white supremacy is a timeless norm rather than a social structure designed to ensure the dominance of a certain group. Race has been linked to blood and ancestry…

Read or purchase the article here.

A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

The Faster Times
2010-11-18

Johnathon Mandell

Opening Date: 2010-11-18
Closing Date: 2011-01-09

Written by John Guare
Directed by George C. Wolfe

As “A Free Man of Color” begins, its hero, an ex-slave, is a bewigged, bejeweled fop who is the wealthiest and most sexually desirable man in New Orleans. Like the character, the play seems to have everything going for it: deeply talented creators, an exciting cast, splendid costumes, a fascinating period in American history. By the end of the play, the character has been destroyed, in a harrowing half hour that is the dramatic and theatrical highlight of the piece. Long before that end, however, the average theatergoer is likely to feel let down by John Guare’s new play. If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color”—ambitious, inventive, daring, sprawling—is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to sit through.

Set largely in New Orleans between 1801 and 1806, but wandering around the world, the play, which has now opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, presents the complex intrigue surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, and imagines the effects of these actual historical events on fictitious characters.

The historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the play are tantalizing, especially those with contemporary parallels. To pick one of the more obscure examples: If the 21st century has civil unions for gay people, early 19th century New Orleans had plaçage, an arrangement between a white man and a woman of color…

Read the entire review here.

The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History

Journal of Southeast Asian History
Volume 9, Issue 2 (1968)
pages 191-207
DOI: 10.1017/S021778110000466X

Paul W. van der Veur, Professor of History
Australian National University

Persons of mixed European and Asian parentage appeared in the Indonesian archipelago shortly after the arrival of the first “Westerners” in the sixteenth century. Although most of them were absorbed by the indigenous population, some were not and came to constitute a separate, identifiable group. The main reason, apart from paternal pride, seems to have been religious. Christianity, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, encouraged a strong feeling of responsibility toward the biracial offspring of non-European women. A moral obligation was felt to baptize the child and give it the name of the father. Legal rules and regulations facilitated the process: the European father, for example, could “recognize” his natural child by a non-European woman, adopt it, or request a “Letter of legitimation”. Possession of “the status of European” in the nineteenth century permitted persons of mixed descent to benefit educationally from the rapid expansion of “European” (i.e. Dutch) schools. Finally, the Dutch nationality law of 1892—based squarely on the jus sanguinis principle—contained the crucial provision that all those who were considered Europeans when the act came into force (July 1, 1893)—including those who were legally assimilated and socially a part of the European group—became Dutch citizens.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brief History: Loving Day

Time Magazine
2010-06-11

Christopher Shay

In February 1961, Barack Obama’s parents did something that was illegal in 22 states and that 96% of the population disapproved of: they got married. In fact, interracial marriage, sex and cohabitation would remain illegal in much of the U.S. for another six years. Then on June 12, 1967, in the case Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the country’s anti-miscegenation laws, allowing interracial couples across the country to marry. Thirteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the court took the last legal teeth out of the Jim Crow era, ridding the U.S. of its last major piece of state-sanctioned segregation. June 12 has since become a grass-roots holiday in the U.S., especially for multiracial couples and families. Known as Loving Day, the celebration commemorates the 1967 case and fights prejudice against mixed-race couples, and is a reason to throw an awesome, inclusive party…

Read the entire article here.

The “One Drop Rule” revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2010-12-21

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Many people, perhaps most, think of “race” as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the term “passing.” Most of us immediately picture a light-skinned person who is “hiding” their African ancestry. Many would go further and accuse that person of denying their “real” racial identity. Yet few people would accuse a dark-skinned person who has an Anglo ancestor of trying to pass for “black,” and thereby denying their “true” Anglo roots!

So why is a white person with an African ancestor presumed to be “really” black? In fact, in this day of DNA testing, it’s become increasingly clear that many more white-identified people have a “drop” or two of African ancestry than most ever imagined. Are lots of white folks (or are they black?) “passing,” then, without even knowing it?

Having said all that, I’d like to provide some historical examples of the shifting and arbitrary nature of racial categorization. Those familiar with Newt Knight already know about the 1948 miscegenation trial of his great-grandson, Davis Knight. According to the “one drop rule” of race, Davis was a black man by virtue of having a multiracial great-grandmother (Rachel Knight). Yet, social custom and the law differed. One was legally “white” in Mississippi if one had one-eighth or less African ancestry, and Davis eventually went free on that legal ground…

…In 1884, Mary Ann McQueen, a young white woman about 33 years old, was suspected of having “black” blood. So strong were these suspicions that her mother, who had always been accepted as white, swore out a deed in the Montgomery County Court that “solemnly” proclaimed her daughter to be “purely white and clear of an African blood whatsoever.” But why did suspicions about the “purity” of Mary Ann McQueen’s “blood” arise in the first place?…

Read the entire essay here.

Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas

Johns Hopkins University Press
December 2010
136 pages
14 halftones
Hardback ISBN: 9780801898129
Paperback ISBN: 9780801898136

Paul Lawrence Farber, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern Life Sciences, Intellectual History
Oregon State University

This book explores changing American views of race mixing in the twentieth century, showing how new scientific ideas transformed accepted notions of race and how those ideas played out on college campuses in the 1960s.

In the 1930s it was not unusual for medical experts to caution against miscegenation, or race mixing, espousing the common opinion that it would produce biologically dysfunctional offspring. By the 1960s the scientific community roundly refuted this theory. Paul Lawrence Farber traces this revolutionary shift in scientific thought, explaining how developments in modern population biology, genetics, and anthropology proved that opposition to race mixing was a social prejudice with no justification in scientific knowledge.

In the 1960s, this new knowledge helped to change attitudes toward race and discrimination, especially among college students. Their embrace of social integration caused tension on campuses across the country. Students rebelled against administrative interference in their private lives, and university regulations against interracial dating became a flashpoint in the campus revolts that revolutionized American educational institutions.

Farber’s provocative study is a personal one, featuring interviews with mixed-race couples and stories from the author’s student years at the University of Pittsburgh. As such, Mixing Races offers a unique perspective on how contentious debates taking place on college campuses reflected radical shifts in race relations in the larger society.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Mixed-Race Couple in the 1960
• 2. Scientific Ideas on Race Mixing
• 3. Challenges to Opinions on race Mixing
• 4. The Modern Synthesis
• 5. The Modern Synthesis Meets Physical Anthropology and Legal Opinion
• 6. University Campuses in the 1960s
• 7. Science, “Race,” and “Race Mixing” Today
• Epilogue
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index

“A blood mixture which experience has shown furnishes the very highest grade of citizen-material”: Selective Assimilation in a Polynesian Case of Naturalization to U.S. Citzenship

American Studies (ISSN: ISSN 0026-3079)
Volume 45, Number 3 (Fall 2004)
pages 33-48

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology
Wesleyan University

On the 11th of July, 1928, the front page of the Honolulu Pacific Advertiser read: “75 per cent white blood satisfies U.S.” The article reported what seems to be the landmark decision of U.S. District Court Judge William Lymer to allow a racially mixed Pacific Islander—Alfred Milner Stephen—to naturalize to U.S. citizenship. While the discussion focused on naturalization and citizenship, in Stephen’s case, blood racialization also played a key role. By blood quantum logic, Stephen was identified as three-quarters English and one-quarter Polynesian, the latter inherited from his mother, who was referred to as “half English and half Polynesian.” Judge Lymer argued that Stephen’s “predominance” of “white blood” qualified him for citizenship.

In 1790, when Congress passed a law to establish a uniform standard for naturalization—the Nationality Act—it was limited to “all free white persons.” Although Congress amended the Nationality Act in 1870, it did so only to conform to the intent of the Reconstruction amendments by expanding eligibility for naturalization only to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” (Ancheta 1998, 23). Judge Lymer, who made clear that he was determining whether Stephen was a “white person” within the meaning of the 1870 nationality law, made him, in the words of Ian Haney Lopez, “white by law” (1996)…

…However, the justifications for racial prerequisites changed. For over thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries courts assumed that scientific evidence and common knowledge were consistent in defining who was “white.” But, as contradictions between scientific evidence and common knowledge became more pronounced (e.g. as when anthropologists classified some dark-skinned people as Caucasians), courts increasingly came to rely on common knowledge justifications alone (Lopez 1996, 7).

The Stephen case revealed the confusion surrounding the “scientific” and “common knowledge” definitions of whiteness. In petitioning for naturalization, Stephen was challenging longstanding legal precedent based on “scientific evidence” and “common knowledge,” but, as courts increasingly relied on the latter, it became apparent that the two definitions could no longer be reconciled. Judge Lymer reflected this problem when he remarked that the Stephen case was the first time a federal court had considered status of a person with “more than half white blood” and “less than one half Polynesian, Malay, or Oriental blood.” The Stephen case reveals the complicated intersections of race and nation in early twentieth-century American culture.

This essay discusses the rationales that guided the judge’s decision. It was the “predominance” of whiteness mixed with Stephen’s “Polynesian blood” that made the difference in the court’s decision. But that factor alone did not motivate Judge Lymer’s decision. Pervasive notions about the potential for Hawaiians to assimilate and to fulfill the requirements of American citizenship were also crucial in this ruling. Although the court recognized Stephen as Polynesian, it deemed him white enough to become American. Stephen could be de-racialized as a legal subject in the courtroom because of racial logic that assumed the easy assimilation of Polynesians based on the historical treatment of racially mixed Hawaiians. Hawaiians and some other Pacific Islanders—in this case Stephen was identified as a Polynesian who came from “Neuru Island”—were inconsistently incorporated into whiteness through a process of selective assimilation. That is, they were selectively incorporated as whites when racially mixed (depending on degree), where white “blood”—in relation to indigenous “blood”—has been figured as a solvent…

Read the entire article here.