Mixed Race Studies

The Bluest Eye [Review of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky]

The New York Times
2010-02-25

Louisa Thomas, Contributing Editor
Newsweek Magazine

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. By Heidi W. Durrow. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2010. 264 pages. Cloth ISBN-13: 9781565126800)

There’s a reason many great social justice novels are written as historical fiction or contain elements of fantasy or allegory: This builds a certain crucial distance into their storytelling. Heidi W. Durrow is the daughter of an ­African-American serviceman and a white Danish mother, and her first novel was, according to her publisher, “inspired by true events.” On the face of it, the story of a biracial girl growing up in 1980s America, grappling with confusion over both her identity and a complicated, mysterious family history, couldn’t be more timely or important. But in the moments when Durrow’s novel seems to tackle its big themes most self-consciously — when it appears written for the Age of Obama — it can be predictable, even dull. It’s when it approaches the questions of identity and community more subtly and indirectly that “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” can actually fly…

Read the entire review here.

The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Wasafiri: The Magazine Of International Contemporary Writing
Volume 18, Issue 39
Summer 2003
pages 11-17
DOI: 10.1080/02690050308589837

Laura Moss, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

Read the entire article here.

The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos: “La Raza Cósmica” and Issues of Racial Diversity and Purity

suite101.com
2010-01-26

Melanie Zoltan, Adjunct Professor of History
Bay Path College

In “The Cosmic Race” (“La Raza Cósmica” in Spanish), José Vasconcelos argues that racial diversity and interbreeding will produce one superior race. Is it code for purity?

While The Cosmic Race (La Raza Cósmica) sounds like the name of a new video game from Nintendo starring Mario and Luigi, this essay (in book form) written by Latin American philosopher José Vasconcelos in 1925 presents arguments on racial diversity and interbreeding that set the intellectual world ablaze when it was published and that continue to be debated by scholars…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Volume 13,  Number 4 (April 2003)

Barbara L. Graham, Professor of Political Science,
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader. By Kevin R. Johnson (Editor). (New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. 505 pages. Cloth ISBN: 0-8147-4256-4. Paper ISBN: 0-8147-4257-2)

In Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader, Kevin R. Johnson has edited one of the most important and timely anthologies on the general topic of race mixture and the law. The anthology addresses a range of provocative issues concerning the mixed race experience and the law and its impact on mixed race peoples. For readers who are unfamiliar with the vast literature on the mixed race experience, I am confident that they will find this book’s interdisciplinary approach indispensable in its grappling with issues raised by multiracialism and the law. Johnson’s book, part of the Critical America Series published by New York University Press, takes critical race theory into another direction in its emphasis on mixed race scholarship.  As with many of the writings of critical race theorists, Johnson’s book has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom of the black-white paradigm. The writings persuasively demonstrate that America has always been a mixed race society, that the law has played a major role in shaping racial categories, classification schemes, intermarriage, immigration and trans-racial adoption issues to name a few. Race is addressed as a social construct and Johnson – as well as the other contributors – acknowledges how law has not kept up with the fluid racial boundaries in the American context. This book covers the diversity of the mixed race experience in America, including African American, Indian, Latina(o) and Asian populations. Johnson argues in the introduction that “racial mixture will undoubtedly shape the future study of race and civil rights in the United States. As minorities of many different types intermarry and rates of immigration of diverse peoples to this country remain high, more racial mixtures and mixed race peoples will emerge.”  The writings in the anthology take the reader on a journey in an effort to understand the complexities of racial mixture in the United States and abroad.

Johnson has carefully selected eighty-seven edited scholarly writings, primarily law review articles published in the 1990s and a few court cases.  The reader is divided into twelve parts in an attempt to examine the complexities of racial categories and what they mean for a mixed race society.  Part I addresses the history and slow demise of anti-miscegenation laws. The edited selections cover issues such as an historical overview of these laws, the history of racial identification and the regulation of interracial sex in colonial Virginia, and the relationship between lynchings and interracial relationships.  As expected, Johnson includes writings on an analysis of Loving v. Virginia (1967) and its impact.  Readers may be unfamiliar with an important precursor to Loving, Perez v. Sharp (1948), where the California Supreme Court held that the state anti-miscegenation law violated the Constitution.  Going beyond the white-black context, the other writings in Part I cover attempts to regulate intermarriage between Indians and whites and Asians and whites…

Read the entire review 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.

Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Book Review)

Civil War Book Review
Louisiana State University Special Collections

Kelly Kennington, 2009-2010 Law & Society Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Legal Studies
University of Wisconsin Law School

Jones, Bernie D. Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South, University of Georgia Press. 216 pages. 2009.

Fathers of Conscience, Bernie D. Jones, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, examines southern state appellate court decisions concerning the wills of white slaveholders who left property to their mixed-race children. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, white slaveholders often engaged in sexual relationships with enslaved women. Southern communities typically accepted this behavior, as long as it remained hidden. But problems arose when white men chose to recognize the children of interracial unions and grant them freedom and property, particularly when these grants came at the expense of white relatives. In the latest contribution to the Studies in the Legal History of the South series, Jones argues that contests over wills forced southern judges to weigh the right of white slaveholders to dispose of their property as they wished against community concerns about the growing free black population and the threat it posed to the institution of slavery.

The first two chapters of Fathers of Conscience describe the types of cases that resulted throughout the antebellum South when potential white heirs challenged the validity of a slaveholder’s will, focusing especially on the language southern jurists used in their decisions. The first chapter argues that judges had “a limited set of tropes from which to choose” in deciding cases involving mixed-race inheritance, so they primarily described white testators in three ways: as “righteous fathers” who took responsibility for their mixed-race children; as “vulnerable old men” who were under the control of their enslaved black sexual partners; and as “degraded creatures” who garnered the disgust of southern jurists (42). In the second chapter, Jones describes judges whose language focused not on categorizing white men but on the consequences of these wills for southern society. Judges in these instances rebuffed white men’s efforts to free their enslaved children because jurists recognized the dangers of expanding the population of free people of color. In doing so, Jones argues that judges were “hiding behind the formal laws of slavery” when they cited statutes to deny the validity of wills (57)…

Read the entire review here.

Review: “Black Gal Swing”: Color, Class, and Category in Globalized Culture [Review of works by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Arthur K. Spears, and Rainier Spencer]

American Anthropologist
Volume 103, Issue 1 (March 2001)
pages 208-211
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.208

Fred J. Hay, Professor and Librarian of the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection Library
Appalachian State University

• Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of “Race,” Nation and Gender. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. New York: Routledge, 1999. 221 pp.
• Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture. Arthur K. Spears, ed. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 242 pp.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States. Rainier Spencer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 222 pp.

(Son Bonds) Now a yellow gal will kiss you. she will kiss you awful sweet—brownskin gal kiss the same.
(John Estes) What do a black gal do?
(Son Bonds:) But a black gal spit ‘bacco juice, spew snuff all on your lips—oh, loving you just the same.

“Black Gal Swing” Delta Boys, 1941

This lyric speaks to the multiple concerns and issues addressed in these three books. In a few short lines, it depicts and satirizes social distinctions based on phenotype. it mocks the dominant economic class’s insistence on the value of whiteness, it rejects these constructs and in addition flaunts (sociologists Odum and Johnson referred to the blues as “the superlative of the repulsive [Odum and Johnson 1925:166]) its defiance of while American capitalist cultural hegemony. It is a multivocalic, nuanced, and subversive manifesto of cultural affirmation by and for those most reviled, oppressed, and economically deprived. Also, it is brutally honest and humorous. Unfortunately, it is rare for scholarly writing to achieve this level of sophistication or this degree of conciseness.

Ifekwunigwe’s Scattered Belongings (“mixed race” people in England) and Spencer’s Spurious Issues (“mixed race” people in the United States) are revised dissertations (Berkeley and Emory, respectively). Spears’s edited volume Race and Ideology is a collection of essays, by nine scholars, each examining an aspect of how racism is “interconnected and maintained” through “language, symbolism and popular culture” (back chut blurb). Ifekwunigwe, Spencer, and Spears agree on one thing: “race” is not a scientifically valid concept and should be discarded. But on how to achieve the goal of a deracialized social order, and on what intermediate steps should be taken to facilitate progress to that goal, there is little agreement among the three.

Spencer, of white German maternity and black American paternity, grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Queens. Ifekwunigwe, of British and Caribbean maternity and Nigerian paternity, was born in Nigeria moved to England when quite young, and then, at the age of ten, moved to “upper middle-class Jewish West Los Angeles” (p. 35). Both authors include family pictures emphasizing the wide range of color and other “racial” traits manifested in their families.

A self-proclaimed “antiracialist” and “antiracial advocate.” Spencer attacks multiracialism on the grounds that biological race does not exist and “social” race—based as it is on outdated concepts of scientific racism and popular readings of phenotype—is also spurious. Spencer argues that without race there would be no racism and that multiracialism is based on the false race concept supporting the hegemonic system of white supremacy. Furthermore, as Spencer notes, if race really existed, most, if not all, Americans would be multiracial.

Spencer’s is a straightforward presentation in which he reconstructs the history of federal racial classification and examines its purpose. He analyzes the ideology and goals of the multiracial movement in the United States, especially of the groups Project Race and the Association of Multiethnic Americans. (Spencer has been a prominent figure in multiracial circles through his column “Spurious Issues” regularly featured in InterRace magazine.) The bottom line is that Spencer is opposed to classifying people by race and adamantly against adding a new category of mixed or multi-race to the federal census. With regret, he acknowledges that for purposes of monitoring the enforcement of civil rights legislation—we must continue to use. for the present, the federal government’s existing racial categories.

Spencer’s argument against muluracialism is sound and well-articulated but, perhaps because of his commitment to antiracialist ideology, Spencer downplays issues of class: he does not acknowledge that the majority of the people in the multirace movement are middle class and committed to upward social mobility. He also downplays Project Race’s denial of and desire to escape from, blackness; ignores recent revitalization movements among what were once disdainfully referred to as “little races” and “tri-racial isolates” (especially the new Melungeon pride crusade); and fails to address issues related to individuals who share a “racial” culture different from their “race” (e.g., R&B legend Johnny Otis, culturally black son of Greek immigrants)…

Read or purchase the article here.