Mixed Race Studies

Kilombismo, Virtual Whiteness, and the Sorcery of Color

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 34, Number 6 (2004)
pages 861-880
DOI: 10.1177/0021934704264009

Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute

This article explores the legacy and current presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the Sorcery of Color as a metaphor for the Brazilian standard of race relations, which transforms a perverse system of racial domination into a pretense of antiracist ideals and establishes what the author describes as the category of virtual whiteness, a fulcrum of identity intrinsically intermeshed with issues of gender and patriarchy. The groundings of Afrocentric thought can be found in the writings and actions of African Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century, and its most articulated expression is the thesis of Kilombismo, developed by Abdias do Nascimento in the context of his work in Pan-African affairs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read or purchase the article here.

A conversation with Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010

Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, discusses three Unionist strongholds in the South,

Q: There seems no end to books about the American Civil War. What does The Long Shadow of the Civil War offer that is new?

A: Although Civil War books about the home front are not new, this is a new sort of home front study that focuses on three communities from three different states. Rather than close with the war and Reconstruction, The Long Shadow of the Civil War follows individual Unionists and multiracial families into the New South era and, in some cases, into the twentieth century. This historical sweep allows the reader to understand the ongoing effects of the war at its most personal levels…

…Q: Newt Knight, the controversial “captain” of the Knight Company, is a polarizing figure who even today evokes heated arguments among readers. Why is this so, and how did it affect your historical treatment of him?

A: As long as we continue to debate the causes, meanings, and effects of the Civil War, Newt Knight’s motives and character will also be debated. We know that he defied Confederate authority during the war, supported Republican Reconstruction afterward, and openly crossed the color line to found a mixed-race community. To neo-Confederates, such facts make Newt a scoundrel and a traitor to his country and his race. To neo-abolitionists, he is a backwoods Mississippi hero who defended his nation and struggled to uplift the black race. My response to such powerful and emotional narratives is to examine critically not only the documentary evidence, but also the mountain of published opinions about Newt Knight that have too often functioned as “evidence” for both sides of the debate.

Q: Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and former family slave, Rachel, were the founding parents of a multiracial community. What sort of a community was it in terms of racial identity? How did members of the community identify themselves racially, as opposed to how the larger white society defined them?

A: As segregation took hold in New South Mississippi (1880-1900), the descendants of Newt, Serena, and Rachel were increasingly defined by white society as black, i.e. as “Negroes,” despite being of European, African, and Native American ancestry. Before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, however, few of these descendants identified themselves as “black.” Depending on their physical appearance, including skin shade and hair texture, descendants of Newt and Rachel variously defined themselves as white, Indian, or colored. Whereas white society applied a “one drop rule” that grouped together all people of African ancestry, these descendants self-identified in ways that reflected their multiracial heritage.

There is no direct evidence of how Newt, Serena, or Rachel racially identified their multiracial descendants. Descendant Yvonne Bivins, the most thorough Knight researcher, was told by her elders that Newt Knight actively encouraged his descendants to identify as white. All that is certain — but nonetheless remarkable — is that they economically supported, nurtured, and lived openly among both white and multiracial kinfolk all their lives.

Q: By crossing the color line, Newt Knight deviated from the norm by acknowledging and supporting his multiracial descendants. What may we deduce from those facts about his political views on race relations in the era of segregation?

A: Since we don’t know that Newt Knight identified his multiracial descendants as “black,” we can’t deduce from his intimate relationships with them, or by his efforts to enroll them in a local school (one that he helped create) alongside his white descendants, that he supported equality for all people of African ancestry — that is, for people classed as “Negroes.” Only if we adhere to the “one drop rule” — and assume that Newt Knight did, too — can we conclude that Newt’s protection of his own kinfolk extended to all Americans of African ancestry.

Newt’s efforts on behalf of freedpeople as a Republican appointee during Reconstruction do not necessarily make him an advocate of black equality, as some historians have argued. There were many Reconstruction Republicans who supported the same basic rights of marriage and military service that Newt upheld for freedpeople, while supporting segregation and opposing black voting rights. We simply don’t know Newt’s political position on these issues…

Read the entire interview here.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
240 pp.
6.125 x 9.25, 9 illus.
1 map, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3381-0
Large Print ISBN: 978-0-8078-7909-2

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

In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states–North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause.

Examining regions within the South where the inner civil wars of deadly physical conflict and intense political debate continued well into the era of Reconstruction and beyond, Bynum explores three central questions. How prevalent was support for the Union among ordinary Southerners during the Civil War? How did Southern Unionists and freed people experience both the Union’s victory and the emancipation of slaves during and after Reconstruction? And what were the legacies of the Civil War–and Reconstruction–for relations among classes and races and between the sexes, both then and now?

Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum’s insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Visit Dr. Bynum’s blog Renegade South here.

Husband And Wife Duo Paved The Way For Blacks In Diplomacy [Interview with Adele Logan Alexander]

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2010-02-10

Michel Martin, Host of Tell Me More

with

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Tell Me More continues its Black History Month series with a conversation with Adele Logan Alexander. Alexander is professor of history at George Washington University and a member of the National Council on the Humanities. She’s also author of “Parallel Worlds,” a new book that details the lives of married couple William Henry Hunt and Ida Gibbs Hunt. William Henry Hunt was the first African-American to have a complete career in U.S. diplomacy; Ida Gibbs Hunt was an intellectual on world issues.

…MARTIN: And I have to ask you a question, which might be a delicate one for some people, which is these were both very light-skinned people.

Prof. ALEXANDER: Yes.

MARTIN: And, you know, this is an issue which has kind of newly surfaced because of, you know, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments about Senator Obama, or rather President Obama’s complexion. But I do want to ask whether these two people moved in the world as African-Americans, or were they seen as white? Were they passing?

Prof. ALEXANDER: I am convinced, and many other sources that I quote in this book are convinced that one of the reasons he lasted so long with the State Department was that they really weren’t quite 100 percent sure. But one of the tricky points with this comes when what do you do when people simply assume in a world where you don’t think in the middle of France, where certainly the local people didn’t run into African-Americans all of that time – here is this sophisticated man, here is this consul who likes to do sporting things and ride horses and eat fine food and wine. He is not part of their image of what a black man is supposed to be. And, of course, in France a lot of the things that black people were pictured as had to do with their colonial visions, and they didn’t fit this picture…

 Listen to the interview and/or read the transcript here.

Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926

Vintage Press an imprint of Random House
1999
720 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-75871-6 (0-679-75871-2)

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Winner for the top non-fiction prize of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author’s own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans–both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War and married a recently freed slave, Alexander shows three generations of Bonds as they take chances and break new ground.

From Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from Herman Melville‘s New England to the Jim Crow South, from urban race riots to the battlefields of World War I, this fascinating chronicle sheds new light on eighty crucial years in our nation’s troubled history. The Bond family’s rise from slavery, their interaction with prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and their eventual, uneasy realization of the American dream shed a great deal of light on our nation’s troubled heritage.

See Adele Logan Alexander of speak about tracing her racial identity through her family roots in her book “Homelands and Waterways” in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show from 1999-10-26 here.

Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin

University of Virginia Press
February 2010
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
40 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8139-2887

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

When William Henry Hunt married Ida Alexander Gibbs in the spring of 1904, their wedding was a glittering Washington social event that joined an Oberlin-educated diplomat’s daughter and a Wall Street veteran who could trace his lineage to Jamestown. Their union took place in a world of refinement and privilege, but both William and Ida had mixed-race backgrounds, and their country therefore placed severe restrictions on their lives because at that time, “one drop of colored blood” classified anyone as a Negro. This “stain” of melanin pushed the couple’s achievements to the margins of American society. Nonetheless, as William followed a career in the foreign service, Ida (whose grandfather was probably Richard Malcolm Johnson, a vice president of the United States) moved in intellectual and political circles that included the likes of Frederick Douglass, J. Pierpont Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Church Terrell.

Born into slavery, William had an adventurous youth, including a brief career as a jockey and an interlude at Williams College; ultimately he succeeded Ida’s father as consul. The diplomat’s “expatriate” life provided him with a distinguished career and a stage on which to showcase his talents throughout the world, as well as an escape from racial stigmas back home. Free of the diplomatic hindrances her husband faced, Ida advocated openly against race and gender inequities, and was a major participant in W. E. B. Du Bois‘s post-World-War I Pan-African Congresses which took her to stimulating European capitals that were largely free of racial oppression.

In this, William and Ida’s unique dual biography, Adele Logan Alexander gracefully traces an extraordinary partnership with a historian’s skills and insights. She also presents a nuanced account of the complex impact of race in the early twentieth-century world.

Listen to National Public Radio‘s Michel Martin interview Adele Logan Alexander about the book on Tell Me More (on  2010-02-10) here.

The Chinese in the Caribbean

Markus Wiener Publishers
November 2004
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-55876-314-7; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-314-2
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-55876-315-5; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-315-9

Edited by

Andrew R. Wilson, Professor
Strategy and Policy Department
United States Naval War College

The history of the Caribbean is a history of migrations. The peoples of the region came as conquerors and planters, slaves and indentured laborers from all parts of the globe. Each group contributed to the social fabric, culture, and commerce of the region. The Chinese diaspora has spread Chinese people and culture around the world, including to the Caribbean, where Chinese exist both as distinct ethnic groups within Caribbean societies and as shapers of unique Caribbean cultures.

The book describes not merely the arrival and experience of Chinese in the Caribbean but also the ways in which Chinese have adapted to and altered the region. Included are the histories of Chinese people in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, and the British West Indies, and overcame, their slow rise to economic independence and success, their contribution to art, theater, cuisine, and literature, their roles in the region’s national revolutions, their place in post-colonial politics, and the subsequent remigrations of individuals, families, and entire communitites to North America.

The African Presence in Mexico

A Symposium Presented by
Callaloo – A Journal of African Diapora Arts and Letters and
The Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University
2008-10-22 through 2008-10-23
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas

Sessions

• The Road to Blackness: A Search for Identity Within the Afro-Mexican Community (audio, photographs)
• Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Mexico (audio, photographs)
• “Where did the Blacks Go?” Post-Slavery Mexico (audio, photographs)
• Contemporary Afro-Mexicans (audio, photographs)
• “Blacks in the State of Veracrus, Mexico” (A Photographic Exhibition by Marcus D. Jones) (photographs)

For more details, click here.

Blood Will Tell: Scientific Racism and the Legal Prohibition Against Miscegenation

Michigan Journal of Race & Law
University of Michigan Law School
Volume 5, Issue 2 (Spring 2000)
pages 560-609

Keith Edward Sealing, Dean of Students
Widener Law School, Widener University

Laws banning miscegenation endured in the colonies and the United States for more than 300 years. When the Supreme Court declared all such laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, sixteen such statutes and constitutional provisions were still in effect. Scientific racism determined a hierarchy within the White race that placed the Teutonic at the top, the Anglo-Saxon as the heir to the Teuton, and the American as the current leading branch of that line. Prior to the Darwinian revolution, two competing scientific theories, monogenism and polygenism, were applied to justify miscegenation statutes. The “monogenists” believed that all men descended from a single ancestor and were of the same species. This theory comported with the Bible and the story of Ham, as interpreted literally by the fundamentalists. The “polygenists” saw Blacks as a separate and inferior species descended from a different “Adam,” and, thus, saw slavery as qualitatively no different from the ownership of a horse, and miscegenation as approaching bestiality. These beliefs and attitudes endured well into the Twentieth Century, supported after 1900 by the eugenics movement. This article focuses on anti-miscegenation statutes as applied to former slaves and others of African descent, particularly in the South. This article first examines the miscegenation paradigm in terms of a seven-point conceptual framework that not merely allowed but practically demanded anti-miscegenation laws, then looks at the legal arguments state courts used to justify the constitutionality of such laws through 1967. Next, it analyzes the Biblical argument, which in its own right justified miscegenation, but also had a major influence on the development of the three major strands of scientific racism: monogenism, polygenism and Darwinian theory. It then probes the concept upon which the entire edifice is constructed—race—and discusses the continuing vitality of this construct. Next, this article turns to the major strands of scientific racism and briefly develops more modern theories that continued the racist tradition well into the Twentieth Century. The article then looks at the effects of scientific racism on the thoughts and actions of the founding fathers and the Reconstruction-era Congress before turning to the long line of state cases upholding miscegenation statutes, in part by relying on scientific racism. Finally, it discusses the cases that questioned the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation statutes, Perez v. Lippold and Loving v. Virginia.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in the Age of Obama

University of Chicago
Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC)
International House, Home Room
1414 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL
2010-03-05, 09:00 to 18:00 CST (Local Time)

The Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of  Chicago presents a daylong conference, “Mixed-Race in the Age of Obama,” which seeks to intervene in the discursive, material, and ideological debates involving mixed-race people nationally and internationally, examining historical, sociological, literary, legal, and other (inter)disciplinary representations of the lived experience of mixed race people. Organized by Dr. Matthews Briones, Department of History at U of C. Co-sponsored by International House Global Voices Program. Free & open to the public.

For more information, click here.