Mixed Race Studies

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Oxford University Press
March 1997
592 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195052824; ISBN10: 019505282X

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?

Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of “interracial literature.” In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of “either-or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.

Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analyzing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of “mixed race.”

Sollors’ interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of “race,” and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about “race,” and where interracial relations can go from here.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction:
• Black—White—Both—Neither—In-Between xv
• 1. Origins; or, Paradise Dawning 31
• 2. Natus Æthiopus/Natus Albus 48
• 3. The Curse of Ham; or, from “Generation” to “Race” 78
• 4. The Calculus of Color 112
• 5. The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign 142
• 6. Code Noir and Literature 162
• 7. Retellings: Mercenaries and Abolitionists 188
• 8. Excursus on the “Tragic Mulatto”; or, the Fate of a Stereotype 220
• 9. Passing; or, Sacrificing a Parvenu 246
• 10. Incest and Miscegenation 285
• Endings 336
• Appendix A: A Chronology of Interracial Literature 361
• Appendix B: Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation 395
• Notes 411
• Selected Bibliography 523
• Index 561

Race and Mixed Race

Temple University Press
October 1993
232 pages
6×9
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-265-5, ISBN: 1-56639-265-9
    
Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

In the first philosophical challenge to accepted racial classifications in the United States, Naomi Zack uses philosophical methods to criticize their logic. Tracing social and historical problems related to racial identity, she discusses why race is a matter of such importance in America and examines the treatment of mixed race in law, society, and literature.

Zack argues that black and white designations are themselves racist because the concept of race does not have an adequate scientific foundation.  The “one drop” rule, originally a rationalization for slavery, persists today even though there have never been “pure” races and most American blacks have “white” genes.

Exploring the existential problems of mixed race identity, she points out how the bi-racial system in this country generates a special racial alienation for many Americans. Ironically suggesting that we include “gray” in our racial vocabulary, Zack concludes that any racial identity is an expression of bad faith.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Existential Analysis
1. Introduction: Summary, Method, and Structure
2. The Ordinary Concept of Race
3. White Family Identity
4. Black Family Identity
5. Demography and the Identification of the Family
6. Mixed-Race Family Identity

Part II: The History of Mixed Race
7. Introduction to the History of Mixed Race
8. The Law on Black and White
9. Marooned!
10. The Harlem Renaissance: Cultural Suicide
11. Genocidal Images of Mixed Race
12. Mulattoes in Fiction
13. Alienation

Part III: The Philosophy of Anti-Race
14. Nobility versus Good Faith
15. Black, White, and Gray: Words, Words, Words

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture

Duke University Press
1998
272 pages
13 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-2105-X, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2105-7
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-2120-3, ISBN13 978-0-8223-2120-0

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor, African and African American Studies
Duke University

Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, Impossible Purities looks at the construction of “Englishness” as white, masculine, and pure and “Americanness” as black, feminine, and impure. Brody’s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness.

Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoe’s “A True-Born Englishman,” which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose mixed-race status reveals the “unseemly origins of English imperial power.” Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, “black” figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in the context of debates about the “new woman,” slavery, and fears of the monstrous degeneration of English gentleman. Impossible Purities concludes with a discussion of Bram Stoker’s novella, “The Lair of the White Worm,” which brings together the book’s concerns with changing racial representations on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Victorian studies, literary theory, African American studies, and cultural criticism.

Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America

Mercer University Press
2006
192 pages
ISBN (paperback): 9780881460742
ISBN (hardback): 9780881460131

Tim Hashaw

Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civil disobedience; the Melungeons, however, fought by telling folktales. Whites and blacks gave the name “children of perdition” to mixed Americans during the 300 years that marriage between whites and nonwhites was outlawed. Mixed communities ranked socially below communities of freed slaves although they had lighter skin. To escape persecution caused by the stigma of having African blood, these groups invented fantastic stories of their origins, known generally as “lost colony” legends. From the founding of America, through the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II, the author documents the histories of several related mixed communities that began in Virginia in 1619 and still exist today, and shows how they responded to racism over four centuries. Conflicts led to imprisonment, whippings, slavery, lynching, gun battles, forced sterilization, and exile—but they survived.  America’s view of mixing became increasingly intolerant and led to a twentieth-century scheme to forcibly exile U.S. citizens, with as little as “one drop” of black blood, to Africa even though their ancestors arrived before the Mayflower. Evidence documents the collaboration between American race purists and leading Nazi Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust. The author examines theories of ethnic purity and ethnic superiority, and reveals how mixed people responded to “pure race” myths with origin myths of their own as Nazi sympa-thizers in state and federal government segregated mixed Americans, citing the myth of Aryan supremacy. Finally, Children of Perdition explains why many Americans view mixing as unnatural and shows how mixed people continue to confront the Jim Crow “one drop” standard today.

MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons

Eclectica Magazine
July/August 2001

Tim Hashaw

Introduction

They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.  Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America’s largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.

One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community.  Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820.

Wrong on two counts. In fact:

1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619.

2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years.

This bears repeating.

Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters.

The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700.  Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners.

Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name “Melungeon”….

Read the entire article here.

5 Shades of Pink: A Coerced Identity

In cooperation with The Graduate Association of Rhetoric and Performance Studies.
A Graduate Thesis Performance Exploring Biracial Identity in the 19th Century.

Monroe Lecture Center Theater
California Avenue, South Campus
Hofstra University
2009-03-19 19:30 (Local Time)

by Melissa J. Edwards
Hofstra University

This performance explores the influences of the 1859 play The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, miscegenation laws, and the U.S. Census on biracial identity.  All these factors are used in the analysis of the racial identity of [“Pinky”] Sally Maria Diggs, a 9-year-old girl whose freedom was purchased by the congregation [for $900 USD on 1860-02-05] of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, through the efforts of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and his associates.  The performance is intended to educate and present the theories of social impact on racial identity while providing historical fact and content.

“Freedom Ring” by Eastman Johnson, from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1934-03-21, p. 1
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library

People of God, Children of Ham: Making black(s) Jews

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
Volume 8, Issue 2 (July 2009)
pages 237 – 254
DOI: 10.1080/14725880902949551

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Davis

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self-conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish.  This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co-religionists yet racial others in Israel.

Read or purchase the article here.

Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference
Palmer House Hotel
Hilton, Chicago, IL
2008-04-03

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

We trace American political discourse around multiracialism, race-mixing, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content analysis of themes and assumptions in almost 2,100 articles from the same newspapers, also using keywords that indicate racial mixture.

These datasets provide evidence on two analytic and two substantive points: First, the press’s treatment of mixture permits us to analyze “racial meaning,” defined as the varied ways in which Americans construe, practice, and judge group-based identities and identifications. Second, the datasets enable us to trace the timing of changes in ideas about racial meaning, and to map these changes onto a new periodization of distinct institutional treatments of racial mixture. Substantively, the dataset show vividly how much Americans argued over what counted as a race, how people were to be allocated to and across races, and what implications racial groupings should have. The contemporary racial order, which looks inevitable and orderly in hindsight, was not at all clear while it was being created. Most importantly, the language of the newspaper articles shows vividly that Americans’ debates over racial mixture and racially mixed people were (and continue to be) a critical site for contestation over racial hierarchy, advance, and equality.

Read the entire paper here.

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

Octoroon means a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genealogically, it means one-eighth black. Typically an Octoroon has one great-grandparent who is of full African descent and seven great-grandparents who are not.

hexadecaroon (1/16th)
dotriacontaroon (1/32)
tetrahexacontaroon (1/64)
octaicosahectaroon (1/128)
hexapentacontadictaroon (1/256)
dodecapentactaroon (1/512)
tetraicosakiliaroon (1/1,024)
octatetracontadiliaroon (1/2,048)
hexanonacontatetraliaroon (1/4,096)
dinonacontahectaoctaliaroon (1/8,192)

See IUPAC numerical multipliers.

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

…Quadroon usually referred to someone of one-quarter black ancestry; that is, with three white grandparents but also refers to a person of one-quarter caucasian ancestry and three-quarters black ancestry.  A quadroon has a biracial (mulatto) parent (black and white) and one white parent or black parent…

From Wikipedia.