Mixed Race Studies

The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice

Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review
Volume 29 (1993)
62 pages

Ian F. Haney Lopez, John H. Boalt Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member for The Center for Social Justice
Berkeley Law School
University of California, Berkeley

Under the jurisprudence of slavery as it stood in 1806, one’s status followed the maternal line. A person born to a slave woman was a slave, and a person born to a free woman was free. In that year, three generations of enslaved women sued for freedom in Virginia on the ground that they descended from a free maternal ancestor. Yet, on the all-important issue of their descent, their faces and bodies provided the only evidence they or the owner who resisted their claims could bring before the court.

The appellees… asserted this right [to be free] as having been descended, in the maternal line, from a free Indian woman; but their genealogy was very imperfectly stated …. [T]he youngest… [had] the characteristic features, the complexion, the hair and eyes … the same with those of whites …. Hannah, [the mother] had long black hair, was of the right Indian copper colour, and was generally called an Indian by the neighbours…

Because grandmother, mother, and daughter could not prove they had a free maternal ancestor, nor could Hudgins show their descent from a female slave, the side charged with the burden of proof would lose.

Allocating that burden required the court to assign the plaintiffs a race. Under Virginia law, Blacks were presumably slaves and thus bore the burden of proving a free ancestor; Whites and Indians were presumably free and thus the burden of proving their descent fell on those alleging slave status. In order to determine whether the Wrights were Black and presumptively slaves or Indian and presumptively free, the court, in the person of Judge Tucker, devised a racial test:

Nature has stampt upon the African and his descendants two characteristic marks, besides the difference of complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of colour either disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and woolly head of hair. The latter of these disappears the last of all; and so strong an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended from parents of different complexions, whether white or Indians…. So pointed is this distinction between the natives of Africa and the aborigines of America, that a man might as easily mistake the glossy, jetty clothing of an American bear for the wool of a black sheep, as the hair of an American Indian for that of an African, or the descendant of an African. Upon these distinctions as connected with our laws, the burden of proof depends.

The fate of the women rode upon the complexion of their face, the texture of their hair, and the width of their nose. Each of these characteristics served to mark their race, and their race in the end determined whether they were free or enslaved. The court decided for freedom:

[T]he witnesses concur in assigning to the hair of Hannah… the long, straight, black hair of the native aborigines of this country….

[Verdict] pronouncing the appellees absolutely free…

After unknown lives lost in slavery, Judge Tucker freed three generations of women because Hannah’s hair was long and straight.

I. Introduction: The Confounding Problem of Race

I begin this Article with Hudgins v. Wright in part to emphasize the power of race in our society.  Human fate still rides upon ancestry and appearance. The characteristics of our hair, complexion, and facial features still influence whether we are figuratively free or enslaved. Race dominates our personal lives. It manifests itself in our speech, dance, neighbors, and friends-“our very ways of talkdng, walking, eating and dreaming are ineluctably shaped by notions of race.” Race determines our economic prospects. The race-conscious market screens and selects us for manual jobs and professional careers, red-lines financing for real estate, green-lines our access to insurance, and even raises the price of that car we need to buy. Race permeates our politics. It alters electoral boundaries, shapes the disbursement of local, state, and federal funds, fuels the creation and collapse of political alliances, and twists the conduct of law enforcement. In short, race mediates every aspect of our lives.

I also begin with Hudgins v. Wright in order to emphasize the role of law in reifying racial identities. By embalming in the form of legal presumptions and evidentiary burdens the prejudices society attached to vestiges of African ancestry, Hudgins demonstrates that the law serves not only to reflect but to solidify social prejudice, making law a prime instrument in the construction and reinforcement of racial subordination. Judges and legislators, in their role as arbiters and violent creators of the social order, continue to concentrate and magnify the power of race in the field of law. Race suffuses all bodies of law, not only obvious ones like civil rights, immigration law, and federal Indian law, but also property law, contracts law, criminal law, federal courts, family law, and even “the purest of corporate law questions within the most unquestionably Anglo scholarly paradigm.” I assert that no body of law exists untainted by the powerful astringent of race in our society.

In largest part, however, I begin with Hudgins v. Wright because the case provides an empirical definition of race. Hudgins tells us one is Black if one has a single African antecedent, or if one has a “flat nose” or a “woolly head of hair.” I begin here because in the last two centuries our conception of race has not progressed much beyond the primitive view advanced by Judge Tucker.

Despite the pervasive influence of race in our lives and in U.S. law, a review of opinions and articles by judges and legal academics reveals a startling fact: few seem to know what race is and is not. Today most judges and scholars accept the common wisdom concerning race, without pausing to examine the fallacies and fictions on which ideas of race depend. In U.S. society, “a kind of ‘racial etiquette’ exists, a set of interpretive codes and racial meanings which operate in the interactions of daily life…. Race becomes ‘common sense’—a way of comprehending, explainiug and acting in the world.” This social etiquette of common ignorance is readily apparent in the legal discourse of race.

Rehnquist-Court Justices take this approach, speaking disingenuously of the peril posed by racial remediation to “a society where race is irrelevant: while nevertheless failing to offer an account of race that would bear the weight of their cynical assertions. Arguably, critical race theorists, those legal scholars whose work seems most closely bound together by their emphasis on the centrality of race, follow the same approach when they powerfully decry the permanence of racism and persuasively argue for race consciousness, yet do so without explicitly suggesting what race might be. Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem of race is that few people seem to know what race is.

Adopting an interdisciplinary/dedisciplinizing approach, the first half of this essay critiques existing theories of race from venues into which legal scholars rarely venture, namely biology, sociology, and literature. The last half of this essay advances a new theory of race as a social complex of meanings we continually replicate in our daily lives. Part II of this Article considers and rejects the most widely accepted understanding of race, which I term “biological race.” By “biological race,” I mean the view of race espoused by Judge Tucker, and still popular today, that there exist natural, physical divisions among humans that are hereditary, reflected in morphology, and roughly but correctly captured by terms like Black, White, and Asian (or Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid). Under this view, one’s ancestors and epidermis ineluctably determine membership in a genetically defined racial group. The connection between human physiognomy and racial status is concrete; in Judge Tucker’s words, every individual’s race has been “stampt” by nature. Part II explains that despite the prevalent belief in biological races, overwhelming evidence proves that race is not biological. Biological races like Negroid and Caucasoid simply do not exist. Finally, Part II introduces the argument, newly popular among several scholars, that races are wholly illusory, whether as a biological or social concept. Under this thinking, if there is no natural link between faces and races, then no connection exists.

Under the rubric of “social race,” Part III criticizes the ethnicity, nationalist, and colonialist theories of race. All three theories repudiate the idea that race is a fixed essence and instead locate races within the cartography of other social constructions. These theories fall short of providing a comprehensive or sophisticated understanding of race because they each treat race as a facet of some larger social phenomenon whether that be ethnic identity, cultural struggle, or the dynamics of colonialist conquest and resistance. This section critiques these theories in order to elaborate on a theory of racial formation or, as I call it, racial fabrication. “Racial formation” refers to the process by which the social systems of meaning we know as race accrue to features and ancestry.

In this Article, I define a “race” as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology andlor ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions. As used in this Article, the referents of terms like Black, White, Asian, and Latino are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of humankind.

In Part IV, I expand upon the proffered definition of race by examining the deployment of race in our daily lives. Despite the role of history—that is, despite the actions and reactions of the preceding generations—race remains common sense today only to the extent we continue to invest our morphology with racial meaning. The divisions we commonly discuss as Black, White, and so forth are relatively recent inventions, dating back in their current incarnations no more than a couple of hundred years. These divisions remain subject to constant contestation and revision, with their continued existence dependent on our acquiescence and participation today and tomorrow. This section deconstructs the micromechanics of race, the way race shapes and is in turn shaped by individual lives. It does so in terms of chance, context, and choice, or roughly, appearance and ancestry, social setting, and personal action. I argue that to a limited but largely unrecognized extent we as individuals and communities choose our races.

Part V brings this Article full circle by examining the connection between race and personal identity. Racial groupings in our society have been built upon and in turn have built up the edifices of cultural groups, establishing a close, even inseverable, relationship between races and communities. As collections of individuals who share a common culture and a similar world-view, these communities provide the crucial bridge between race and identity. In contact across the medium of communities, race and identity overlap and influence each other; each is both product and producer of the other. This last section completes the racial fabrication thesis by arguing for a connection not only between our face and our race, but for a link, however tenuous and at times obliterated, between our race and our soul…

Read the entire article here.

Never a Neutral State: American Race Relations and Government Power

Cato Journal
Volume 29, Number 3 (Fall 2009)
Pages 417-453

Jason Kuznicki, Research Fellow and Managing Editor, Cato Unbound
Cato Institute

Economics tells us that racial discrimination is expensive. Yet social psychology suggests that humans nonetheless tend to mistrust those whom they identify as outsiders. As a result, governments can exacerbate this mistrust and thereby encourage costly discrimination by creating or maintaining official race-based definitions of outgroups and differential outcomes based on race.

This article reviews evidence from economic and legal history to argue that not only did U.S. governments incentivize and even mandate racial discrimination, but these acts tended to reinforce racial mistrust as time went by. Segregation became more strict, not less, from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-20th century, largely because of growing and self-perpetuating state action. Discrimination created its own constituency.

Some skeptics of the civil rights movement have viewed racial discrimination as an essentially private matter that did not warrant the extensive state intervention. This view is untenable. Although certain measures passed in the name of black civil rights still raise serious legal issues in light of strict constitutional construction, the civil rights movement also dismantled a wide variety of even more troubling measures. Most of these can be characterized as straightforward impediments to the freedoms of movement, trade, and association.

Although, if given a free market and a neutral state, economic incentives will tend to work against racial discrimination, American history has never witnessed a neutral state. Instead, and until the mid-20th century, the market incentives that might have worked against discrimination were repeatedly frustrated. Recent historical scholarship, notably from left-leaning scholars, has done much to
show the depth and surprising recentness of state support for discrimination…

…Consider the American experience with legal definitions of race. From the earliest English settlements to the present, governments have worked to establish and refine definitions of race, almost always for invidious purposes, and frequently with tighter and tighter standards as to who received racial privileges and who did not. This behavior is indeed similar to that observed in guilds, occupational licensure, and professional organizations, in which membership requirements tend to grow more stringent over time and new areas are brought under the restrictive umbrella (Gelhorn 1976, Young 1991, Dorsey 1983).

Legal definitions based on genealogy arrived very early. Although mixed-race individuals were born shortly after the first importation of African slaves, 17th century legislatures nonetheless criminalized sex between Africans and Europeans (Jordan 1968: 139–44). These punishments did little to stop interracial sex, however, as both demographics and ever-stricter laws would seem to demonstrate. A 1705 statute from Virginia declared that the “child, grand child or great grand child of a negro”—that is, anyone of one-eighth or more African descent—would also be classified as black. Colonial North Carolina went further, to one sixteenth (Jordan 1968: 168).

In general, the legal scrutiny applied to one’s ancestors tended to increase rather than decrease over time. By the 1830s, U.S. courts were occasionally encountering the argument that, regardless of what the law said, a person with any degree of racial mixing would have to be considered black, and these arguments gradually spread through the 19th century legal system. Yet it may surprise today’s readers that the first legislated statewide “one-drop” policy only arrived in 1910, following a series of court cases in the late 19th century that had adopted this rule either out of a perceived necessity or, sometimes, at the requests of black litigants. Prior to 1910, and as recently as the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895, whites had generally rejected the one-drop rule for fear that their own mixed-race ancestries—and liaisons—would be called into question (Sweet 2005: 299–316).

The year 1910 saw the heyday of both Jim Crow and the eugenics movement. Many state legislators were eager to preserve white racial purity, then understood as a scientifically validated goal, and interested parties in the white population increasingly viewed “racial hygiene” as a legitimate state aim (Cynkar 1981). The creators and defenders of anti-miscegenation and one-drop laws believed that their efforts went hand in hand with forced sterilization and the eugenics movement more generally; all were seen as prudent measures to prevent degradation of white America’s genetic stock. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which both established the one-drop rule and reiterated the state’s longstanding ban on miscegenation, was signed into law on March 20, 1924, the same day as its sterilization act. Both were understood at the time to be part of a coherent agenda (Sherman 1988: 69).

There is little evidence, however, that this law initially enjoyed significant popular support. On the contrary, outside the legislature and the few interested parties that lobbied for it, the populace appears to have been well aware of (though certainly uncomfortable with) its racially mixed ancestry. As historian Richard B. Sherman writes, “The campaign for racial integrity in Virginia was not the product of a great popular ground swell. Rather, it was primarily the work of [a] dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites” (Sherman 1988: 71–72). Sherman argues for the crucial importance of a small and not very well-attended group of “Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America” in drafting and lobbying for Virginia’s one-drop statute. Although the phrase had not yet been made infamous, these clubs called for a “final solution” to “the Negro problem,” terms that even stripped of their Nazi associations are still deeply disturbing (Sherman 1988: 74–75).

Virginia newspapers were among the proposed law’s early supporters, perhaps because they recognized the shock value of a moral panic that combined sex, secrecy, and many readers’ private anxieties. Predictably, another supporter was the director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, who would see a significant increase in his own power and prestige as the bill became a law. His bureau was charged with classifying the race of all births in the state and with certifying the racial purity of every marriage between Virginia residents, an extraordinary new addition to government power (Sherman 1988: 75–77)…

Read the entire article here.

America’s new racial heroes: Mixed race Americans and ideas of novelty, progress, and Utopia

University of Texas, Austin
May 2007
250 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3345886
ISBN: 9781109010473

Gregory Thomas Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation, “America’s New Racial Heroes,” is the first full-length intellectual history examining the fascination with mixed race people that has been concurrent with the stereotypes that pathologize them. Through five moments in United States history, this project asks what the idea of racially mixed people does for America, uncovering a set of vanguards who suggested that, rather than fear racial mixing, we should embrace it as a means to live up to ideals of equality and inclusion, thus benefiting the nation as a whole. Whether the subject is abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s defense of racial amalgamation, the popularity of the Melting Pot trope, Time Magazine’s 1993 New Face of America issue, or the promises of a “Multiracial” category on the 2000 census, similar notions regarding novelty, progress, and utopia repeat themselves. Rounding out “America’s New Racial Heroes” is an examination of contemporary praise of ambiguity at the same time Americans wish for quantifiable racial makeup. Overall, this project warns against the giddy hope that racially mixed people alone can solve America’s racial problems.

I have several models in bringing together these five cases, including George M. Fredrickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind, Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian, and Robert Lee’s Orientals. Each of these shows how discourses of science, nationality, and popular culture shape the identities of dominant and minority groups concurrently. Like these works, my project brings together archival research, cultural studies readings, and theories of racial formation to examine how pro-mixing advocates situate themselves within their own contexts and resonate through time. This work on mixed race identity has many intersections with both fields, accentuating the richness that can result from comparative, ethnic studies work across disciplinary boundaries.
 
Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Wendell Phillips: Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed
Amalgamationist
Introduction
From Brahmin to Radical
Marriage Law Petition and Europe
The United States of the United Races and Beyond
Phillips and Miscegenation
Conclusion

Chapter 2: Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot vs. Jean Toomer’s Stomach

Chapter 3: The New Face of America: The Beauty, the Beast

Chapter 4: Census 2000 and the End of Race as We Know It

Chapter 5 Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
Introduction
Tiger Woods: 100% Unambiguous
Mixed Race Models: Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
DNAPrint: Racial Makeups ‘R’ Us
Conclusion

Conclusion
Bibliography
Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Founding Chestnut Ridge: The Origins of Central West Virginia’s Multiracial Community

The Ohio State University
Department of History
Project Advisor: Randolph Roth, Professor of History and Sociology
March 2010
140 pages

Alexandra Finley
The Ohio State University

Senior Honors Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with research distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The “Guineas” of West Virginia
I. Race and the Male Brothers
II. The Legend of Sam Norris
III. The Life of Gustavus Croston
IV. Henry Dalton’s Fate
V. The Chestnut Ridge People

Appendix A: Associated Surnames and Variant Spellings
Appendix B: Related Genealogies
Appendix C: The Legend of Sam Norris
Appendix D: The Writings of Bill Peat Norris
Appendix E: Associated Families
Appendix F: Maps
Bibliography

Introduction: “A Clan of Partly Colored People:” The “Guineas” of West Virginia

For visitors to Philippi, West Virginia, the name Chestnut Ridge Road carries no significance. There is nothing to distinguish it from Main Street or Walnut Street in the minds of strangers to that small mountain town. For the people of Barbour County, however, Chestnut Ridge carries a connotation that few guests to the area can understand. Natives of the region recognize Chestnut Ridge Road, Kennedy Road, Croston School Road, and Norris Ridge Road as distinct from the rest of Philippi, home to the “Chestnut Ridge People,” the multiracial descendants of early European pioneers, free African Americans, and Native Americans.

Before the ancestors of the Chestnut Ridge People had been defined by the white community as a distinct outside group, they were individual settlers who, like frontier residents of European descent, had migrated westward in hopes of a better life. What set these men and women apart was their racial background. Some, like Henry Dalton, moved west after completing indentures that had resulted from their illegitimate “mulatto” birth. Others, like Hugh Kennedy, were descendents of multigenerational multiracial families that could be traced back to the seventeenth century. One, Wilmore Male, was an Englishman who chose to live as man and wife with his slave, Nancy.

These multiracial families’ difference from the white community gave them a shared experience. The Males and the Daltons quickly intermarried, the free black Hill family taught Henry Dalton’s children the trade of stonemasonry, and each ancestor of the Chestnut Ridge People provided support for others in the same position as themselves. The ties they created survived into the twentieth century.

Though they maintained close relationships among themselves, the ancestors of the Chestnut Ridge People did not live in an entirely insular community. Many individuals formed friendships with their white neighbors and partook in the activities of the white community. Their race was not an impediment to accumulating real estate or personal property. Nor did race prevent many from gaining respect in the wider community, especially as several of the men were Revolutionary War veterans.

Given the background of these first multiracial settlers and the levels of success experienced by many, several questions arise. How were people of mixed race treated on the frontier? Did their experience differ from that of the free black community that remained part of the Atlantic world? How was race defined on the frontier, especially in the case of individuals whose racial background was considered ambiguous? Were all of the restrictions placed on free blacks by lawmakers in the eastern half of the state enforced as stringently in the western half?

The available literature of the Chestnut Ridge community does little to address these questions. Most of what has been written on the group concerns only genealogy and fails to place individuals in a historical context. Almost all of this genealogical work avoids the issue of African heritage and, if it is addressed at all, denies such ancestry in favor of a solely Native American and European background. Additionally, the foundation of most genealogical accounts is community legend rather than historic documentation.

With the notable exception of Avery F. Gaskins, writers from other disciplines such as sociology who have dealt with the Chestnut Ridge People have also focused on legend rather than historical fact. John Burnell, for instance, examined in the 1950s the contemporary status of the group and touched upon speculations about their history without considering the issue in detail. When the community appeared in surveys like Brewton Berry’s that considered multiple multiracial groups in the United States, it was generally given little attention in comparison to better-known multiracial groups such as the Melungeons. Gaskins is the only researcher who has addressed the historical origins of the Chestnut Ridge People in detail.

Within the next five chapters, I will continue Gaskins’s work decoding the true history of the group. I aim to provide a comprehensive history of the Chestnut Ridge community into the nineteenth century and place the experiences of the first multiracial settlers to the area in a historical context. The lives of the Chestnut Ridge People’s ancestors cannot be considered outside of the era and location in which they existed or the prevailing racial attitudes that they encountered in the world around them. Considered together, the story of these multiracial settlers highlights the unique experiences of frontier life and the ways in which everyday interaction between whites and blacks could defy the standards for race relations set by lawmakers…

Read the entire paper here.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Review by Paul D. Escott]

H-Net Reviews
May, 2010
3 pages

Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History
Wake Forest University

“Few histories,” writes Victoria Bynum, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political and social dissenters” (p. 148). The Long Shadow of the Civil War disinters a number of remarkable dissenters in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas. It introduces the reader to stubbornly independent and courageous Southerners in the North Carolina Piedmont, the Mississippi Piney Woods, and the Big Thicket region around Hardin County, Texas. These individuals and family groups were willing to challenge their society’s coercive social conventions on race, class, and gender. They resisted the established powers when dissent was not only unpopular but dangerous–during the Civil War and the following decades of white supremacy and repressive dominance by the Democratic Party. Their histories remind us of two important truths: that the South was never as monolithic as its rulers and many followers tried to make it; and that human beings, though generally dependent on social approval and acceptance by their peers, are capable of courageous, independent, dissenting lives…

…In nearby Orange County, North Carolina, there was “a lively interracial subculture” whose members “exchanged goods and engaged in gambling, drinking, and sexual and social intercourse” (p. 9). During the war these poor folks, who had come together despite “societal taboos and economic barriers,” supported themselves and aided resistance to the Confederacy by stealing goods and trading with deserters. During Reconstruction elite white men, who felt that their political and economic dominance was threatened along with their power over their wives and households, turned to violence to reestablish control. Yet interracial family groups among the poor challenged their mistreatment and contributed to “a fragile biracial political coalition” (pp. 55-56) that made the Republican Party dominant before relentless attacks from the Ku Klux Klan nullified the people’s will…

…Professor Bynum closes her book with a chapter on the interracial offspring of Newt and Rachel Knight. Called “white Negroes” or “Knight’s Negroes” by their neighbors, these individuals continued to exhibit an independent spirit as they dealt with their society and with each other. They chose to identify themselves in a variety of ways; different members of the family adopted different approaches to life. Some passed as white, others affirmed their African American identity, and still others saw themselves as people of color but kept a distance from those whom society defined as Negroes. Within the family group there were many independent spirits. One woman, the ascetic Anna Knight, forged a long and energetic career as an educator and Seventh-Day Adventist missionary…

Read the entire review here.

Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

Columbia University Press
August 1997
248 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-10493-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-10492-0

Kevin Mumford, Professor of African-American History
University of Iowa

Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn—and how it was crossed—in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago’s South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these “interzones.” From Jack Johnson and the “white slavery” scare of the 1910’s to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford’s look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review: Skidmore]

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volumes 88, Number 2 (May 2008)
pages 348-349
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-156

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

In 1933, Gilberto Freyre published his classic Casa-grande y senzala. Although it was ostensibly about the uniquely Portuguese origins of Brazilian civilization, it included innumerable obiter dicta about the difference between the role of race in Portuguese and English America. Freyre argued that the relatively harmonious Brazilian race relations were due to more or less smooth Afro-European miscegenation, which contrasted so sharply with the rigid “one-drop rule” of the United States.

In the years since Freyre published his classic, Brazilian and U.S. scholars and social critics have been debating Freyre’s claims. But the issue has been viewed largely through the prism of each country’s distinct racial experience. In the earlier literature, in particular, relatively few scholars achieved an analysis that could be described as truly objective. That situation began to change several decades ago, as scholars emerged who were generally familiar with both countries. Reginald Daniel is certainly prominent among that number and has given us a systematic work on what is a most complex issue, making the volume useful for scholars in a variety of disciplines…

Read the entire review here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review: Bonilla-Silva]

Social Forces
Volume 81, Number 2 (December 2002)
pages 674-676

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Most books on multiracial matters are as fluffy as a goose-down pillow. These books are often edited collections in which personal narratives by multiracial people from middle-class backgrounds are paraded with very little historical analysis to provide context, no theoretical argument on how multiracialism fits in the larger racial system, and no regard for how representative the stories are. Fortunately, this is not the case with G. Reginald Daniel’s book, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. This is a sophisticated, historically complex, and theoretically driven analysis of multiracialism in the U.S…

Read the entire review here.

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s ‘Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage’ and Louise Heaven’s ‘In Bonds’

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 24, Number 2 (2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-0643, Print ISSN: 0748-4321
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2007.0018

Eric Gardner, Professor of English
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

While the figure of the “tragic mulatta” is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: “What is remarkable though not always acknowledged . . . is the fact that the majority of beautiful mulattas in American novels before 1865 . . . do not end up unfulfilled” (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor’s Maum Guinea, H. L. [Hezekiah Lord] Hosmer’s Adela [The Octooon], John T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood, [Thomas] Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they “must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers,” “more often than not . . . eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely” (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about “the majority”-especially given that Andrews and Kachun’s own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any “complete sets”-this essay shares the sense that mixed-race characters who are not “tragic mulattas” have been absent from our discussions for too long.

This absence is complicated by the disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of the tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of the novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. The reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond the scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child’s early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown’s story) and in part from the limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, the dominance of the figure of the tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant’s dismissal of the full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters-a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women’s texts. It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate the first real resistance to the figure of the tragic mulatta in works such as Child’s Reconstruction-era Romance of the Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy.

This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta-one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic-indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven’s In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine the contours of our sense of the mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature.

I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: the publisher of Sunshine’s fourth edition (which carried the entirely new title The Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; the publisher of In Bonds founded the Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). Indeed, both books demonstrate a rich awareness of the literary discourses of race and race-mixing swirling around them. Though evidence about their composition is lacking, Sunshine repeatedly invokes and rewrites the language of the tragic mulatta figure, while In Bonds actually makes specific reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of the driving force in the novel’s plot (128-29). Though both novels and both authors are absent from contemporary critical work, Sunshine and In Bonds offer fascinating counterpoints to the dominant sense of the figure of the tragic mulatta and presage works that critics have treated as more revolutionary, such as Child’s Romance of the Republic and Harper’s Iola Leroy. Indeed, both Sunshine and (albeit a bit less so) In Bonds suggest that a mixed-race heroine who overcomes potential tragedy is central to America’s future…

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (10th Anniversary Edition)

Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
2006-02-07
352 pages
8.26 x 5.23in
Paperback ISBN: 9781594481925

James McBride

James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared “light-skinned” woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.

The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Mommy,” a fiercely protective woman with “dark eyes full of pep and fire,” herded her brood to Manhattan’s free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents’ loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.

At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. “God is the color of water,” Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life’s blessings and life’s values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth’s determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college—and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.

Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.