Mixed Race Studies

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

Read the entire article here.

Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800

Mia L. Bagneris, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

This dissertation explores interracial themes in the work of Agostino Brunias, a little known but fascinating Italian artist who painted for British patrons in the late-eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean. Brunias came to the Caribbean around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, a British aristocrat who had recently been appointed governor of the West Indian islands ceded to Britain from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. For the next twenty-five years the prolific artist created romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets or sugar plantations, Brunias’s canvases offered picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and outdoor fantasies tinged with rococo naughtiness that selectively recorded the life of the colonized for the eye of the colonizer. Local Colors explores Brunias’s use of interracial sexuality, mixed-race bodies, and racial ambiguity in creating this selective visual record, aiming to discover why the bodies of mixed-race women in particular made such perfect canvases for mapping out the colonial desires of British patriarchs. The project also explores how Brunias’s work might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling the solidification of racial classification of the eighteenth-century.

Comments by Steven F. Riley

Read a excellent essay about the life of Agostino Brunias by Dr. Lennox Honychurch at his website here.

Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 6, Issue 1
March 2005
pages 57-76
DOI: 10.1080/14664650500121827

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867-68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History

Palgrave Macmillan
2002
336 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 16-page b/w photo insert
ISBN: 978-1-4039-6408-3, ISBN10: 1-4039-6408-4

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the courts have defined and regulated mixed-race marriage from the colonial period to the present. Combining a storyteller’s detail with a historian’s analysis, Peter Wallenstein brings the sagas of Richard and Mildred Loving and countless other interracial couples before them to light in this harrowing history of how individual states had the power to regulate one of the most private aspects of life: marriage.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: “That’s No Good Here”
• Part I. Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue
  • Sex, Marriage, Race, and Freedom in the Early Chesapeake
  • Indian Foremothers and Freedom Suits in Revolutionary Virginia
  • From the Chesapeake Colonies to the State of California
  • Race, Marriage, and the Crisis of the Union
• Part II. Equal Protection of the Laws
  • Post-Civil War Alabama
  • Reconstruction and the Law of Interracial Marriage
  • Accommodating the Law of Freedom of the Law of Race
  • Interracial Marriage and the Federal Courts, 1857-1917
  • Interlude: Polygamy, Incest, Fornication, Cohabitation – and Interracial Marriage
• Part III. Problem of the Color Line
  • Drawing and Redrawing the Color Line
  • Boundaries – Race and Place in the Law of Marriage
  • Racial Identiy and Family Property
  • Miscegenation Laws, the NAACP, and the Federal Courts, 1941-1963
• Part IV. A Breakthrough Case in California
  • Contesting the Antimiscegenation Regime – the 1960s
  • Virginia vesus the Lovings – and the Lovings versus Virginia
  • America after Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue: The Color of Love after Loving
  • Appendices
  • Permanent Repeal of State Miscegenation Laws, 1780-1967
  • Intermarriage in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa
  • Indentity and Authority: An Interfaith Couple in Israel
  • Transsexuals, Gender Identity, and the Law of Marriage

Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition

Rodopi
2007
330 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-2141-9 / 90-420-2141-1

Edited by:

Joel Kuortti, Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture
University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Jopi Nyman, Acting Professor of English
University of Joensuu, Finland

This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• Contributors
• Joel KUORTTI and Jopi NYMAN: Introduction: Hybridity Today
• Part One: Reconstructing Theories of Hybridity
• • David HUDDART: Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship
  • Sabine BROECK: White Fatigue, or, Supplementary Notes on Hybridity
  • Dimple GODIWALA: Postcolonial Desire: Mimicry, Hegemony, Hybridity
  • Jeroen DEWULF: As a Tupi-Indian, Playing the Lute: Hybridity as Anthropophagy
  • Paul SHARRAD: Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory
  • Andrew BLAKE: From Nostalgia to Postalgia: Hybridity and Its Discontents in the Work of Paul Gilroy and the Wachowski Brothers
• Part Two: Reading Hybridity
  • Zoe TRODD: Hybrid Constructions: Native Autobiography and the Open Curves of Cultural Hybridity
  • Sheng-Mei MA : The Necessity and Impossibility of Being Mixed-Race in Asian American Literature
  • Jopi NYMAN: The Hybridity of the Asian American Subject in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World
  • Joel KUORTTI: Problematic Hybrid Identity in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Andrew HAMMOND: The Hybrid State: Hanif Kureishi and Thatcher’s Britain
  • Valerie KANEKO LUCAS: Performing British Identity: Fix Up and Fragile Land
  • Samir DAYAL: Subaltern Envy? Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh
  • Mita BANERJEE: Postethnicity and Postcommunism in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Salman Rushdie’s Fury
  • Index

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
2009-03-23
pp. 218-220

Mark Kessler, Chair of the Department of History & Government and Professor of Government
Texas Woman’s Univeristy

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638)

In this highly original and important book, Peggy Pascoe describes and analyzes three centuries of laws in the United States prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual relations. In perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic study of legal marriage and sex prohibitions to date, Pascoe argues that these laws were central ideological tools used in constituting and reproducing white supremacy in the United States. Placing her study in its broadest context, she argues that examining the rise and decline of these laws “provides a locus for studying the history of race in America” (p.2). Pascoe’s study demonstrates how historical research, combined with critical cultural theory and analysis, may shed new light on significant questions regarding the power of law and legal interpretation in constructing and reconstructing social reality.

Throughout this work, the writing is admirably accessible, while the analyses and arguments are deeply nuanced. Pascoe begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in characteristics of participants, laws, and regions of the country in which the cases arose, and to help address the broader questions of nation-building and nation-formation that emerge from this study. Pascoe uses these very human stories, along with landmark appellate court decisions and local legal practices, to explore the many and varied ways in which social and political relations based on race, gender, and sexuality illuminate the rise and fall of miscegenation law in the United States.

Pascoe’s narrative begins in the Reconstruction era, when the term “miscegenation” was first invented and applied to interracial marriage and sex. Her discussion focuses on the ways in which judges, legislators, and lawyers employed notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in conventional cultural discourses about sex, gender, and sexuality to create and apply laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. Such laws emerged first in the South and North and typically applied exclusively to relations between those categorized racially as “white” and as “black.”…

Read the entire review here.

Sociohistorical Constructions of Race and Language: Impacting Biracial Identity

A chapter in The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. By Jean Lau Chin (Editor). (Santa Barbara, California. Praeger Publishers, 2004. 1,000 pages. ISBN: 0-275-98234-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98234-8)

Matthew J. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Historically, race has been constructed within the American psyche as a dichotomous variable–and either-or proposition.  Moreover, our construction and use of language have developed to mirror the is reality, which ultimately aids in its perception.  Has this divergent approach to race outlived its usefulness and applicability?  Is it realistic, given the face of today’s changing demographic landscape?  At present, there remain cultural and linguistic disconnects between the phenomenological experience of the biracial individual and the expectations of the dualistic society within whichthey reside.  On the individual level, there are implications for psychosocial development (Hall, 2001; Root, 1995).  More broadly speaking, what will develop from the resolution of the dilemma is a new paradigm impacting how the citizens of this country view race and racial identity.  This paper explores the impact that the sociohistorical constructions to race and language have on the lives of biracial individuals.  To this end, the author, who is biracial, will blend sociohistorical conceptions of race and linguistic philosophy with personal narrative components and conclude with implications for multiracial identity development…

Read the entire chapter here.

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Vol. 18 No.9 (2008-09-15)
pp. 788-791

Daniel Lipson, Professor of Political Science
State University of New York, New Paltz

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation. By Lauren L. Basson. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 256 pages.)

At a moment in United States history when Barack Obama is inspiring millions in his presidential bid, the reality of mixed-race Americans is becoming increasingly salient in a nation long obsessed with dichotomous black and white racial categories. With the population of people of color in the United States accelerating at rates unmatched by any other country in the world, racial discourse in the US has gradually come to accommodate the full cast of official minorities, moving beyond the limited focus on blacks and whites. Yet the historical precedent in the United States has been to leave little space for mixed-raced Americans, instead preserving the racial order by forcing them into monoracial categories. As Lauren Basson explains in White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation, the turn of the 20th century proved to be a highly dynamic period that left a major imprint on the distinctive American model of racial categorizations…

Read the entire review here.

The Monticello Mystery-Case Continued

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LVIII, Number 4 (October 2001)
Reviews of Books

Alexander O. Boulton, Professor of History
Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie College)

The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. Edited by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001. Pp. 207.)

A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson. By Byron W. Woodson, Sr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Pp. xviii, 271.)

Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello, By Lucia Stanton. Monticello Monograph Series. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000. Pp. 192.)

In October 1998 the announcement that DNA analysis identified Thomas Jefferson as the most likely father of a child by his slave Sally Hemings seemed to bring to a conclusion a historical debate that had been waging for years. Any remaining doubts about Jefferson’s paternity were apparently removed when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the organization that owns and operates Jefferson’s historic Charlottesville, Virginia, home Monticello, issued a report soon afterward declaring that “the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” Several notable scholars of Jefferson quickly reversed their previous denials of the affair. A book on the subject issued by the University Press of Virginia and a Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, both containing articles by leading historians, presented the new consensus “that virtually all professional historians will accept that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children.”

Now, two new books have shattered the illusion that a kind of historical finality had been achieved…

Read the entire article here.

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Review)

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LX, Number 1 (January 2003)
Reviews of Books

Richard Godbeer, Professor of History
University of Miami

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. By Kirsten Fischer. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 265.)

Kirsten Fischer’s compelling new book explores the interplay between sexual relations and racial attitudes in colonial North Carolina. In common with other recent scholars, Fischer sees evolving conceptions of race, sex, gender, and social status as closely intertwined in the early South. Unlike those who argue for a shift in emphasis from gender or class to race, Fischer stresses instead “the continual contestation, reassertion, and reconfiguration” of these categories as “assumptions of gender, race, and class difference propped each other up in the developing social hierarchy” (p. 5). Fischer identifies a gradual movement away from somewhat fluid notions of race toward an ideology in which racial difference figured as permanent and inherent. Sexual regulation played a crucial role in official attempts to affirm and police racial boundaries in southern society. This in turn “made race seem as corporeal as sex” and so “bolstered the notion that race was a physical fact” (pp. 10-11).

In colonial society, the establishment of slavery and racial subordination required careful regulation of European as well as African residents and especially of white women. Legislation that prohibited marriage between servants, outlawed interracial sex, and prescribed lengthy apprenticeships for the mixed-race children of white women made marriage and sex integral to the imposition of racial as well as class and gender ideologies. Yet sexual unions in North Carolina embodied the contestedness of racial relations in the early South: as “men and women made personal choices based on many contingencies, of which racial or ethnic identity was only one” (p. 7), they often challenged emerging proscriptive codes. The widespread incidence of unauthorized unions bespoke the resilience of alternative popular codes and the willingness of ordinary colonists, women and men, to ignore or self-consciously resist official norms….

Read the entire review here.