Mixed Race Studies

Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor’s Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

History News Network
December 2009

Renee Romano, Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College

“Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

On a fall evening in 1921, eighteen-year old Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the son of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, met Alice Jones, a 22-year old maid. After a complicated romance, the two married in 1924. But only one month after their wedding, news reports began to circulate that Rhinelander’s new bride was “colored,” the daughter of a white British mother and a father of “colored” West Indian origins. Under intense pressure from his family, Leonard deserted his new wife and appealed to the New York courts to annul his marriage on the grounds that Alice had deceived him about her race. The 1925 Rhinelander annulment trial became a media spectacle, and as historian Elizabeth Smith-Pryor asserts in her fine new book, a “social drama” that revealed the anxieties of white northerners about racial instability in response to sweeping cultural and demographic changes during the Jazz Age.

Closely analyzing the Rhinelander trial in the historical context of the 1920s, Smith-Pryor explores why the public became obsessed with the tale of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones and what that obsession reveals about the expansion and strengthening of racial hierarchies in the North in the period after the Great Migration. Two migrations—that of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to the United States, and that of southern blacks to northern cities—intensified anxieties in the North about how to determine race and how to uphold and maintain racial boundaries in the 1920s. Whites sought to find new ways to shore up the boundaries of race, and as Smith-Pryor ably demonstrates, although Alice ultimately won the case, the Rhinelander trial became an important site for reasserting notions of race that served to uphold and maintain privilege…

Read the entire book review here.

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

Beacon Press
Published in 1929
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

1111 ENG 126: Racial Passing, Black and White

The College of Saint Rose
Albany, New York
Fall 2009

Eurie Dahn, Assistant Professor of English

In this course, we will analyze depictions of racial passing in American literature. In particular, we will examine narratives where African Americans “pass” for white and vice versa. While the popularity of passing as a historical phenomenon is debatable, it is incontestably a source of literary richness. This course is also about interraciality and the meaning of race itself, as the possibility of passing exposes hidden ambiguities and anxieties about race in the United States. Texts we will read may include those by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Mark Twain, and Walter Mosley. This is a discussion-based course, so come prepared to participate. Fulfills diversity requirement.

“Skinfolks” and “Kinfolks”: Racial Passing in American Films 1930-1960

Department of American Studies
University of Virginia
Summer 2002

Introduction

Characters with a desire to become something that they are not in order to escape their realities have been present from the earliest American films to the present. The popular encyclopedia of American cinema, Videohound, categorizes films with these characters under “Not-So-Mistaken-Identity”. Of these “not-so-mistaken identity” films, more than half of the characters in question are black passing as white. This reflects the American obsession with race, authenticity, and reinvention.

As characters whose racial identity could rest somewhere between black and white, passing characters have the potential to subvert racial categories by proving the falsity of the black and white racial binary. Elaine Ginsberg argued that the power of passing narratives is “its interrogation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative multiple identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress.” However in most popular American films, these characters are never allowed the freedom to define themselves and live with their choices.

Despite the possibilities their existence in a society anxious about interracial sex suggests, they are actually used most often to prove that it is not possible to transcend racial categories. And just in case the repeated humiliation, violence, and personal sacrifices they endure in the films did not persuade the audience to value stability in racial identity, more traditional, stereotypical black characters are always present, and usually placed at the moral center of the films, to reinforce racist definitions of blackness and whiteness…

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An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (review)

Libraries & the Cultural Record
Volume 45, Number 3, 2010
E-ISSN: 1932-9555
Print ISSN: 1932-4855
pages 375-377

Nena Couch, Curator and Professor of Theater
Ohio State University

The life of the librarian seldom is acknowledged beyond the confines of the community in which she or he is active; therefore, Heidi Ardizzone’s biography of Belle da Costa Greene, librarian to J. Pierpont Morgan and first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, should be a welcome publication. Greene was a widely respected and successful librarian who made significant contributions to the development and refinement of Morgan’s collection until his death and continued her work with his son John “Jack” Pierpont Morgan, Jr. She was actively involved in the establishment of the Morgan Library as a public institution. Her work had national and international impact and as such is worthy of a full-length biography. Enhancing her story is her testing of boundaries: she was a woman in what was a man’s field, and she was of mixed race passing as white. However, Ardizzone’s primary interests are not in Greene’s significant professional accomplishments—although they are touched upon in An Illuminated Life—but in “Belle’s social life and experiences” (10) and in speculation about a woman…

Read the entire review here.

Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity

News at Princeton
Princeton University
2009-12-17

Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a leading surveyor who mapped the West after the Civil War.

Back in graduate school, Sandweiss had read a 500-page biography of King that devoted just five pages to a secret, 13-year relationship that King, who was white, had with a black woman.

“Thirteen years, five pages? It just didn’t seem right to me,” said Sandweiss, a historian of the American West who joined the Princeton faculty last year.

A few years ago, Sandweiss decided it was time to investigate. Poring through census documents that were available online, she was able to discover in a matter of minutes that King, who was blond and blue eyed, had been leading a double life as a white man passing as a black man.

“Once I uncovered that, I knew I had to try to unravel the story,” she said.

The result is “Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line,” published earlier this year by The Penguin Press…

…But the most amazing part of King’s story is that someone with fair hair and blue eyes was accepted as a black man. He managed it, Sandweiss said, because of the so-called “one-drop” laws passed in the South during Reconstruction, which declared that someone with one black great-grandparent was considered legally black.

“The laws were meant to make it very difficult to move from one racial category to the other,” Sandweiss said. “Ironically, they made it very possible to do that, because you could claim an ancestry — or more often hide an ancestry — that was invisible in the color of your skin.”…

Read the entire article here.

American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King

National Public Radio
2010-08-18

Steve Inskeep, Host
Morning Edition

U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library

Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter.

They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true.

“James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd,” author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America.”…

…Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why King chose to live a double life — and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. In the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly, the U.S. had to recast some of the ways it thought about questions of race and identity…

Read and/or listen to the story here.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

The Penguin Press
2009-02-05
384 pages
5.98 x 9.01in
Hardcover ISBN 9781594202001

Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History
Princeton University

National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner

The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he loved

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King was named by John Hay “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada King, only on his deathbed.

Noted historian of the American West Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American “race,” an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children. Passing Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the “Todds” wedding in 1888 to the 1964 death of Ada, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery, to finally the legacy inherited by Clarence King’s granddaughter, who married a white man and adopted a white child in order to spare her family the legacies of racism.

A remarkable feat of research and reporting spanning the Civil War to the civil rights era, Passing Strange tells a uniquely American story of self-invention, love, deception, and race.

Caucasia: A Novel

Riverhead an imprint of Penguin
1999-02-01
432 pages
5.31 x 7.99in
Paperback ISBN 9781573227162

Danzy Senna

Winner of:

• Alex Award
• BOMC Stephen Crane Award 1998
• Whiting Award 2002

Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970’s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can’t be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness.

Then their parents’ marriage falls apart. Their father’s new black girlfriend won’t even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire. Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find.

…Fleming’s use of the term ‘passing’ is also worthy of comment. Not only does it have the connotation of deceit and disguise, but it also implies that the offspring of mixed heritage could never be truly English, despite their birth in England and their English mothers. To cross racial boundaries (‘race crossing’) had two meanings: crossing the ‘colour line’ in terms of sexual relationships, and crossing races in the sense of being of mixed race. The white women who crossed the colour line and gave birth to mixed race children were not aliens as such, but liminally placed by virtue of their ‘unBritish’, ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour. Where the mothers were Irish, as some were (as Hodson noted) the mixed race children were even less likely to have been permitted the mantle of Englishness, for the Irish were not only ‘not English’, but frequently seen as ‘not white’ either. There was (and is) a hierarchy of whiteness, in which some people were/are white only some of the time, such as Irish, Latinos, and Jews. Fleming’s assumption that mixed race children were not, and implicitly could not, be English, sounds not dissimilar from the ‘one drop of black blood’ rule that was operating at this time in US Deep South. This ‘rule’ proclaimed that even a single black person in ones ancestry deemed one black. The system was a means of policing entry to the privileged category ‘white’. In the context of Britain in the interwar, the Eugenics Society was concerned with classifying and codifying those of mixed race in an attempt to reduce the threat to racial and national boundaries represented by their presence…

Lucy Bland. “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation”, New Formations. 2007,  Number 60, pages 66-78.