Mixed Race Studies

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

University of North Carolina Press
April 2004
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7

Daylanne K. English, Associate Professor of English & Chair
Macalester College

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English’s interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction

University of North Carolina Press
December 2004
416 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 22 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2902-8
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5567-6

Michele Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New York University

Between 1877 and 1930–years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and “the Negro problem”–African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around “racial destiny,” the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being.

Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

Read the prologue here.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Usage and Terminology
• Prologue. To Better Our Condition One Way or Another: African Americans and the Concept of Racial Destiny
• 1. A Great, Grand & All Important Question: African American Emigration to Liberia
• 2. A Black Man’s Burden: Imperialism and Racial Manhood
• 3. The Strongest, Most Intimate Hope of the Race: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Afro-American Vitality
• 4. The Righteous Propagation of the Nation: Conduct, Conflict and Sexuality
• 5. Making the Home Life Measure Up: Environment, Class and The Healthy Race Household
• 6. The Colored Doll Is a Live One: Material Culture, Black Consciousness, and Cultivation of Interracial Desire
• 7. A Burden of Responsibility: Gender, “Miscegenation,” and Race Type
• 8. What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish: Collection Reproduction and the Sexual Politics of Black Nationalism
• Epilogue. The Crossroads of Destiny
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

Read the entire paper here.

“The Caucasian Cloak”: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest

The Georgetown Law Journal
Volume 95, Issue 2
Pages 337-392

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

The history of Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in the Southwest suggests the danger of allowing state actors or private entities to discriminate on the basis of language or cultural practice. Race in the Southwest was produced through the practices of Jim Crow, which were not based explicitly on race, but rather on language and culture inextricably tied to race. This Article looks at three sets of encounters between Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California—trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion—to see the way in which state actors used Mexican Americans’ nominal white identity under the law to create and protect Jim Crow practices. First, it argues that whiteness operated primarily as a “Caucasian cloak” to obscure the practices of Jim Crow and to make them appear benign, whether in the jury or school context. If Mexican Americans were white, then they were represented so long as whites were represented. Second, it demonstrates that Mexican-American civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals in the courtroom did not simply identify as white; some showed a more complex understanding of “Mexican” as a mestizo race, and others pointed to the idea of race as a status produced by racist practice. Mexicans were nonwhite if they were treated as nonwhite under Jim Crow. Finally, it argues that, at least in twentieth-century Texas and California, cultural discrimination was racial discrimination, and that continuing discrimination on the basis of language ability and other cultural attributes should be scrutinized carefully under antidiscrimination law…

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS BEFORE 1930
A. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
B. WHITE BY TREATY—IN RE RODRIGUEZ
C. SEX ACROSS RACIAL BORDERS: POPULAR AND LEGAL IDEAS OF THE “MEXICAN RACE”

II. THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
A. JIM CROW IN THE SOUTHWEST
B. MEXICAN-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICS

III. LITIGATING MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS
A. THE 1930S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES
B. THE 1940S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES

IV. AFTER HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS: LIFTING THE CAUCASIAN CLOAK
A. FROM HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS TO CISNEROS
B. LA RAZA COSMICA

CONCLUSION

Read the entire article here.

African Americans and National Identities in Central America

Rina Cáceres, Professor of Diaspora Studies Program at the Centro de Investigationes Historicas de America Central
Universidad de Costa Rica

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke University

Mauricio Meléndez

An interdisciplinary, multinational research program to reconceptualize and document, both visually and textually, the history of people of African descent in Central America.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program, Mount Holyoke College and The Center for Central American Historical Research at the Universidad de Costa Rica.

Our collaborative research project seeks to reassess the historical presence and contributions of peoples of African descent to the national histories and identities constructed in Central America over the past two centuries. In choosing a color for the cosmic race, modern nationalist thinkers in the region systematically emphasized the European and Indigenous origins of its peoples, in terms of both historical fact and group agency. Thus they radically discounted not only the importance, role, and presence of any African heritage but also as the centrality of racial or ethnic conflict within the historical experience of non-indigenous sectors of society…

Visit the project website here.

Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Rally ‘Round the Cannon
2010-01-13

Gregg Lange, Class of 1970

The New York Times’ recent genealogy study of Michelle Obama ’85, noting for the first time her slave and mixed-race heritage, seemingly surprised a broad swath of the populace. This indicates that we here in the History Corner of the World haven’t been doing our jobs very well. The complex intertwining of peoples and cultures living side by side for hundreds of years, their humanness grotesquely masked by slavery and then gratuitous segregation, is as near a universal experience as you can find in the United States. We were all involved; we are all affected. Get used to it.  

It is, for a nearby example, pretty much common knowledge that the saga of African-Americans at Princeton began in World War II, and gained no effective traction until the Goheen administration in the 1960s. A whites-only world, if ever there was one.

Let me instead tell you a story more than 200 years old…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

33 pages
Updated 2008-07-03

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature.  This article provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom.  The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population.  Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Read the entire paper here.

Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century

University of Pennsylvania Press
2007
200 pages
6 x 9, 7 illus.
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8122-4056-6

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

“We believe by blood only,” said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War.

Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians.

For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century

Journal of Social History
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2004
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation passed many laws to regulate marriage and sex. This essay first contemplates the gendered aspects of such laws by exploring the importance of Cherokee women’s marital choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women’s choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Cherokee women’s relationship to the production of new citizens in the Nation. Then the essay turns more explicitly to the laws’ racial implications and examines who could marry in the Cherokee Nation and why by first examining Cherokee laws regulating marriage with people of African descent. Cherokees increasingly excluded people of African descent from membership in the Nation through legislation prohibiting legal marriage between Cherokees and people of African descent. Lastly, this essay considers Cherokee legislative provisions to include whites as marriage partners and citizens in the Cherokee Nation. Ultimately, this essay finds that Cherokee officials were redefining Cherokee Indians racially and used marriage laws to write and reinforce this new definition.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance

Temple University Press
November 2002
256 pages
Cloth EAN: 978-1-56639-981-4, ISBN: 1-56639-981-5
Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-982-1, ISBN: 1-56639-982-3

Steve Martinot, Adjunct Professor
San Francisco State University

A significant re-writing of the history of class formation in the US

An important history of the way class formed in the US, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.

Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions. Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries.

A uniquely compelling book, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations.

Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The History And Construction Of Slavery And Race
2. Racialization And Class Structure
3. The Contemporary Control Stratum
4. The Meanings Of White Racialized Identity
Notes
Index