Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of “The Invisible Line”

The Christian Science Monitor
2011-02-23

Stacie Williams, Monitor Contributor

In “The Invisible Line,” law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein uses the stories of three families to explore the fluid nature of racial identity in America.

Race has never been an easy concept in this country; the rigid constructs by which people judge black and white have always left room for individuals who could move across either side of the line. Today, more Americans are choosing to identify as multiracial; that segment of the population has grown 35% since the 2000 Census.

Exhibit A: The president of the United States, who has a white mother, but chooses to identify himself as African American.

Vanderbilt University Associate Law Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein analyzes the constantly evolving perceptions and experience of race in his new book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Sharfstein uses his legal background to fill in the shades of gray and highlight an American experience, which for many changed with the stroke of a pen, or with hair dye.

I recently had a chance to talk with Professor Sharfstein about his book and questions of racial identity in America….

…How key is the role of the Census in gauging how many more people are keeping their racial identities fluid?

As a country, we’re committed to principles of equality. The Census has an important function in figuring out how things are going—how well we’re living up to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination. On one level, how people self-identify is an interesting measure of how far we’ve come. On another level, it’s not completely related to larger societal issues we’ve made a commitment to overcome.

Have your opinions on racial constructs changed with Obama in the White House?

I think this country has changed a lot in the past couple decades and the way in which we understand the color line has been changed. As people have embraced multiracialism, its raised interesting questions about people who have been able to discover they have African Americans in their family history. I think these new ways of understanding identity are playing a role in how people are understanding their heritage. But I do think the election of Barack Obama is a major moment in the history of race. Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.

Read the entire interview here.

Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen

University of Iowa Press
1993
255 pages, 10 photos
Paper 0-87745-437-X, 978-0-87745-437-3

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers “disappeared” after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer’s troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen’s life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer’s connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major impact on African American literary studies.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-06

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University, Washington, D. C.

To the Editor:

Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made in my biography of Toomer, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, published in 1993. Nothing like reinventing the wheel.

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Kimberly A. Barrett, Vice President for Student Affairs
University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama

To the Editor:

Despite the interesting investigative work of its authors, the recent Chronicle article on Jean Toomer was troubling to me because it served as another apparent grain of truth that sustains two deeply entrenched stereotypes. One of these is the myth of the confused mulatto who is disabled by incessant struggles with his or her racial identity. The other is the “one-drop rule“—the idea that anyone with an identifiable black person in his or her lineage is assumed black. I think it’s time we acknowledge the reality of the existence of the well-adjusted multiethnic/biracial white person. As the self-identifying African-American mother of a young man who fit that description while growing up, I’d like to share part of our story in the spirit of balance.

“Your mom is black?” was a frequent refrain and innocent nod to the notion of the one-drop rule when my son’s acquaintances met me for the first time. I must admit that I, too, did not escape the influence of this perennial rule. On those dreamy weekend mornings when my husband and I lay awake pondering who our child would look like, I smugly argued that of course our child would be black because one parent was black. My husband, on the other hand, who is white (of Irish and Danish descent) and a card-carrying member of a Native American tribe, asked with dismay, “Where am I in this equation?”…

———————————————————————————————

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

To the Editor:

In their article on Jean Toomer, the authors Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. claim that Toomer suffered from a case of “conflicted racial identity” (“Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” The Chronicle Review, February 11). Toomer, one of the first proponents of thinking about race in multiracial “American” terms, is now said to have been passing as white. The authors justify this assertion by presenting new evidence that Toomer identified himself differently based on location and situation.

It is true that Toomer most likely self-identified as “Negro” when he registered for the draft. It is also true that in Toomer’s era, and the eras in which his ancestors were identified, census takers were allowed to list racial designation as they perceived it. So, whether Toomer is listed as white or black on the census may say little about his own thoughts on racial identity. It may, however, say much about how he was perceived by the person taking the census and/or responding on his behalf. A similar case can be made for the marriage licenses. In the absence of a handwriting expert, eyewitness, or recorded conversation, it is not verifiable that Toomer self-identified as white or whether he was designated as white by the licensor.

Nevertheless, Byrd and Gates maintain that Toomer had to be passing—and therefore engaging in racial deception—because it is not documented that any of his “direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.”

Flying in the face of decades’ worth of scholarship that builds on Toomer’s work, Byrd and Gates ignore Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” In it, Root states that multiracial people may identify differently over time, may identify differently than their parents or siblings, and that doing so is totally acceptable. As my colleague Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University put it, “It feels like Byrd and Gates have made a conflict where, in fact, there isn’t one.”…

Read the entire responses here.

The Author Speaks: Interview With Daniel J. Sharfstein

AARP Bulletin
American Association of Retired Persons
2011-02-17

Julia M. Klein

His powerful new book examines how three American families became white

Before Daniel J. Sharfstein’s senior year at Harvard, he spent the summer of 1993 in South Africa as a volunteer for a voter education project. There, one of his fellow workers told him she had been categorized as “colored,” or mixed-race, because a constable doing the classification appreciated her father’s service as a police officer.

“As a result of that one simple act, she had led a very different life from her colleagues,” recalls Sharfstein, now associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “That was a revelation to me, that something that could seem as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of a personal relationship or community ties or even just individual whim.”

He returned to the United States wondering whether the same kind of thing had happened here.

Sharfstein’s South African experience, followed by a stint as a journalist, Yale Law School and years of archival research and interviews, led to The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. The book interweaves the story of three families with African ancestry—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—who, over time and in different ways, became identified as white. The color line in America, Sharfstein learned, has been surprisingly permeable. The AARP Bulletin talked to Sharfstein by phone.

Q. Throughout American history, how important was physical appearance in defining whiteness?

A. To a certain degree it was important. We have to remember that, for a long time, the United States was a rural society and almost everybody worked outside. There was a really broad range of complexions that could be considered white…

…Q. What was the legal standard for defining whiteness in the 19th century?

A. There really was no standard. Virginia for more than a century had a one-quarter rule. If you had one African American grandparent, that made someone legally black. Other states, like North Carolina, had a one-eighth rule, while South Carolina didn’t have any specific fraction. One South Carolina court held in the 1830s that “a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.”…

…Q. In slavery’s absence, you write, “preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant aggressive action to enforce them.” Why?

A. What really mattered in the South, in the antebellum period, was not who was black and who was white, but who was slave and who was free. The prospect of freedom for African Americans was a motivating force getting people to think about what racial categories themselves meant. In the last days of slavery, because slavery as an institution was under such attack, white Southerners were countering with race-based justifications, and that survived the demise of slavery. After the Civil War, as black freedom was taking root, right alongside it were modern forms of racism that persist to this day.

Q. You suggest that rigid rules about race only increased the number of people transitioning from black to white. Why was that?

A. When rules became more rigid, they were almost always accompanied by rules that subjected African Americans to higher taxes, made it harder for them to own land and increased fear that free African Americans would be returned to slavery. The harder these laws made it to live and to provide for their children, the greater the incentives were to make the move from black to white. Because these lines were being drawn in a way that essentially separated people who looked white from [other] people who looked white, it was impossible to make the line between black and white impregnable…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line Between Black and White

Smithsonian.com
2011-02-18

T. A. Frail

Vanderbilt professor Daniel Sharfstein discusses the history of the imprecise definition of race in America

For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood—and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine’s T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book:

People might assume that those who crossed the line from black to white had to cover their tracks pretty thoroughly, which would certainly complicate any research into their backgrounds. But does that assumption hold?

That’s the typical account of passing for white—that it involved wholesale masquerade. But what I found was, plenty of people became recognized as white in areas where their families were well known and had lived for generations, and many could cross the line even when they looked different. Many Southern communities accepted individuals even when they knew those individuals were racially ambiguous—and that happened even while those communities supported slavery, segregation and very hard-line definitions of race.

So how did you find the three families you wrote about?

It was a long process. I began by trying to find as many of these families as I could in the historical record. That involved reading a lot of histories and memoirs, and then moving from there to dozens and dozens of court cases where courts had to determine whether people were black or white, and from there to property records and census records and draft records and newspaper accounts. And I developed a list of dozens, even hundreds of families that I could be writing about, and then narrowed it down. The three families that I chose represent the diversity of this process of crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities. I chose families that lived in different parts of the South that became white at different points in American history and from different social positions.

And how did those families come to know about their ancestry?

For many generations, members of these three families tried to forget that they had ever been African-American—and yet when I traced the families to the present and began contacting the descendants almost everyone I contacted knew about their history. It seems that the secrets of many generations are no match for the Internet. In many families, people would talk about going to the library and seeing that it had, say, a searchable 1850 census. One woman described the experience of typing in her great-grandfather’s name, finding him, and then having to call over the librarian to go through the handwritten enumeration form with her—she had to ask the librarian what “MUL” meant, not knowing it meant he was mulatto, or of mixed race. Every family seemed to have a story like this…

Read the entire article here.

Shades of White

The New York Times
2011-02-25

Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London
and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Racial passing is one of America’s deeply hidden traditions, a largely unacknowledged and unstudied aspect of national life. Historically, African-Americans with identifiably dark skin have had only two choices when confronting racial discrimination and oppression: either they could try to ease their burden through accommodation, making the best of a bad situation, or they could engage in protest and active resistance. The situation was often quite different, however, for light-skinned African-Americans of mixed parentage. For them, there was a tempting third option of trying to pass as white.

In an illuminating and aptly titled book, “The Invisible Line,” Daniel J. Sharfstein demonstrates that African-Americans of mixed ancestry have been crossing the boundaries of color and racial identity since the early colonial era. An associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University and an author with a literary flair, Sharfstein documents this persistent racial fluidity by painstakingly reconstructing the history of three families. In a dizzying array of alternating chapters, he presents the personal and racial stories of the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls. The result is an astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights…

Read the entire review here.

Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebears

The Boston Globe
2011-02-20

Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Randall Lee Gibson, an urbane, Yale-educated Confederate general, mocked black people as “the most degraded of all races of men.’’ Later, as a US senator from Louisiana, he helped broker the end of Reconstruction, freeing the South to harass and lynch blacks virtually at will.

In the 20th century, his orphaned son, Preston, was raised by an aunt and her husband, who had been a justice on the US Supreme Court that legitimated racial segregation in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a rent-a-car employee and genealogy buff dubbed himself Sir Thomas Murphy after tracing his mother’s lineage to English aristocracy. His father’s line remained a mystery.

None of these white people knew that they had African-American ancestors who had “passed for white.’’

Race has always been an inherently unstable construct of nature, culture, and law. Should one be considered black if one grandparent or great-grandparent was black? Or does the “one-drop’’ rule hold, that a single black forebear makes one black? Does “race’’ exist in the eye of the beholder, or solely in the mind of the beheld. In today’s age of mixed-race chic—in which Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter are hailed as beautiful royalty—such questions may seem quaint. But throughout American history, the consequences have been deadly.

“The Invisible Line,’’ Daniel J. Sharfstein’s spellbinding chronicle of racial passing in America, reminds us that the phenomenon has existed since our Colonial beginnings—as escape from oppression, enhancement in status, and path to economic opportunity. However well defined in law, the racial line has always remained porous, breachable under the right conditions…

Read the entire review here.

A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of  The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White)

The Penguin Press
January 2011

Lauren Hodapp, Senior Publicist
The Penguin Press

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN 9781594202827.

What is “race” in America?

This is a question that has never had a single answer.  The idea that human beings can be classified, ordered, and assigned superior and inferior status is much older than this country.  In America racial classifications were initially justified on religious grounds, but they evolved into something biological, transmitted through blood from one generation to the next.  At the same time, race was also about how people acted and the rights that they exercised.  During slavery and Jim Crow, each state had its own rules for what made someone white and what made someone black.  Some people who were black in North Carolina, for instance, were white in South Carolina.  Even when there seemed to be some public consensus about what race was, it has always meant something different behind closed doors. 

Once we understand that African Americans were continually crossing the color line and establishing themselves as white, we have to rethink what the categories of “black” and “white” mean.  This is a history that has touched the lives of millions of Americans.  Biology—“black blood”—cannot be what makes a person black.  After all, plenty of white people have black blood, too.  In The Invisible Line I try to strip away centuries of shifting justifications for race and suggest instead that the category of “black” has always functioned as little more than a marker of discrimination.  W. E. B. Du Bois said it best: black means the “person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”

THE INVISIBLE LINE shares the stories of three families over two centuries.  How did you select these particular families?

I chose to focus on the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they epitomize how individuals and families changed racial identities from black to white in different periods of American history and in different parts of the South.  They challenge our conventional wisdom about racial identity and the color line.  I initially researched hundreds of families after years of looking through court cases, government records, histories and other scholarly works, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and family papers from manuscript collections in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. I wound up selecting the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they were typical, but also extraordinary.  An incredible wealth of material about each family has survived the centuries—letters, trial testimony, speeches, wills, property and census records, and more.  Because of this information, I was able to go beyond just establishing the fact that people migrated across the color line and could explore why they did and what effects the migration had on their lives and on the lives of their descendants.

The fluidity with which many of your subjects approach race seems, in many ways, more sophisticated than the way we envision race today. Why?

Much of what we take for granted about race and its history are actually relatively recent developments.  For example, the “one-drop rule,” or the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black, was not the law of Southern states until the 1910s and 1920s.  Before that, states used a patchwork of fractional rules—one-fourth African “blood” made a person black, one-eighth, etc.  These rules, and the ways that courts interpreted them, reflected a reality in which people were constantly crossing the color line.  If the line were policed too strictly, then virtually no one would be safe from reclassification.  And people knew it.  Many scholars today talk about race as a “social construction,” but you can find eerily similar language from plain folks in small Southern towns one hundred years ago.

What did this mean for individuals and families in the 19^th century?

White communities often knew that people were racially mixed and let them in anyway. The typical accounts of “passing for white” involve wholesale masquerade—abandoning family and moving far away, assuming a new name and identity, and the ever present fear of being found out.  But people could become white in areas where their families had lived for generations, and many could become white even when they looked different.  There was such a thing as a “dark white man.”  But for Southern communities, acceptance of individuals did not translate into tolerance on a larger scale.  In fact, some of the very communities that allowed people of color to assimilate supported slavery, segregation, and even lynching.  There was a collective denial, a capacity for living with intense contradiction that is hard for many of us to grasp today.

What did you discover in your research that particularly surprised you?

Becoming white was not necessarily an upwardly mobile act.  In fact, it could be spectacularly downwardly mobile, especially for the “Negro aristocracy” of the late nineteenth century.  Hundreds—including O.S.B. Wall’s children—traded in lives of distinction and leadership for anonymity and often poverty.  It is easy to think that crossing the color line was a perfectly rational act for people who wanted better opportunities for themselves and their children, but the fact that people would go to great lengths to become white even when it was against their interest shows just how poisonous racism has been in the United States.

Henry Louis Gates and the African American Studies department at Harvard has become a legendary source of fresh thinking about race. When you were studying with Gates was there a sense that he and the students were creating a new vision of race?

Absolutely.  My first year as a student in the department was Gates’s first year at Harvard.  He had come with a mission to reinvent the field.  The seminar I took with him that fall was not only an intense introduction to a series of extraordinary texts, but also a class devoted to rethinking what African American Studies should be and making a case for its centrality to our understanding of the American experience.  It was a very exciting time to be at Harvard, and the discussions we had nearly twenty years ago continue to influence me and my work.

How did your own experiences with and perceptions of race influence your work?

My interest in African American history developed as a child listening to stories about my father’s civil rights activism in the early 1960s—the time as an undergraduate he met Martin Luther King, Jr., his experience attending the [1963] March on Washington.  I also grew up with stories about my grandparents’ experience as the children of Eastern European immigrants living in a racially integrated neighborhood in northwest Baltimore.  They learned English from their black neighbors—it was their first exposure to what it meant to be American.

As a college student in 1993, I volunteered on a voter education project in South Africa before the country’s first free elections.  Our office was in a building with two elevators that were still marked “Europeans Only” and “Non-Europeans and Goods.”  My colleagues were all longtime anti-apartheid activists.  The government had classified them as “African,” they said, except for one, who was “Coloured” or mixed-race.  But, she explained, she was not mixed at all—she would have been classified “African,” except for the fact that her father had been a police officer.  In the 1950s an official responsible for classifying the people in her neighborhood decided to reward her father’s service by listing him as “Coloured.”  As a result of that one simple act—one word—she had led a very different life from her colleagues.  She had grown up in a different kind of township, went to different schools, and only spoke English and Afrikaans.  It was a revelation to me that something that seemed as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of personal relationships, community ties, and individual whim.  I came back to the U.S. wondering if the same kinds of things had happened here, and for the first time, I began reading legal cases from the Jim Crow South in which judges and juries had to determine whether someone was white or black.  The cases presented fascinating portraits of communities that were committed to segregation and white supremacy even as they willed themselves to forget their own ambiguous roots.

 How did your law background impact your understanding of the stories, journals, and documents that you encountered while researching THE INVISIBLE LINE?

 Dozens of court cases have involved people crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities—they are some of the best sources of material on the subject—so having experience working with legal documents really helps in making sense of this history.  From soon after the Revolution until well into the twentieth century, just about every law that distinguished white from black provided occasions where courts were forced to determine someone’s race.  Along with marriage prohibitions and segregated schools and trains, there were different tax rates, gun ownership rules, restrictions on who could testify in court, even libel penalties for falsely accusing someone of being black.  Race in America has always involved a lot of rules, and my legal training has enabled me to recognize both the power of law and its limitations.

Which of the individuals you encountered do you feel most affinity for and why?

I really enjoyed getting to know O.S.B. Wall (1825-1891), the son of a plantation owner and his slave, who was freed and sent north to become educated and learn a trade.  He began as a shoemaker and then became a radical abolitionist, Union Army officer, and eventually a politically active lawyer in Washington, D.C.  He was able to preserve his sense of honor and idealism in terrible times both before and after the Civil War.  Even when he was a humble shoemaker, he was never intimidated by powerful people.  And he had a great sense of humor.

The families that you profile span 200 years of American history. What have we previously overlooked in this time span? 

 We have overlooked one of the great mass migrations in American history: the journey from black to white.  It is a migration that affected large numbers of families and communities.  It contradicted and reinforced slavery and segregation.  It forced people to consider what race means, and changed how they thought about race.  The migration occurred alongside other mass movements in our history—the settlement of North America, our expansion west, the rise of great cities, new waves of immigration, and the industrialization of even our most isolated areas.  In a world defined by change, race could never be a static concept.  Americans have always been in motion and have continually reinvented themselves.  The migration from black to white is a part of this dynamic tradition.

More broadly, we have overlooked the vexed relationship between liberty and equality in our nation’s history.  The prospect of freedom for African Americans has been one of the major forces in the evolution of racism in the United States.  In colonial Virginia, African Americans’ quest for freedom gave rise to black codes.  Even as large numbers of African Americans were being freed during the Revolutionary Era, ideas that blacks were biologically inferior gained widespread currency.  In the decade before the Civil War, white Southerners countered Northern arguments against slavery with race-based justifications for the institution that survived its demise.  After the Civil War, black freedom took root alongside modern forms of racism that persist to this day.  Each advance in liberty gave way to potent new forms of inequality.  Every time the struggle seemed over, it had only begun again.

What about today?

The idea that race is blood-borne and grounded in science still has incredible power over how we think about ourselves and order our worlds.  Even in our “post-racial” era, it is very easy for whites to tune out issues involving African Americans or to regard blacks as fundamentally different from—even opposed to—themselves.  Race remains a potent dividing line and political tool.  I hope to shatter the notion that this line exists and help us to realize that we are all related, that the African American experience is absolutely central to the American experience generally, and that our conventional understanding of racial difference and the persistent legacy of racism are shaped in no small part by the secret history that The Invisible Line explores.

Miscegenation and competing definitions of race in twentieth-century Louisiana

Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 621-659

Michelle Brattain, Associate Professor of History
Georgia State University

MARCUS BRUCE CHRISTIAN, AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR AT DILLARD University, observed in the mid-nineteen-fifties that while New Orleans might be known for “gumbo, jambalaya, lagniappe, poor boy sandwiches, pralines, Mardi Gras and Creoles,” it also has “another claim to distinction which has not been bruited about very loudly. ” New Orleans is a place, he wrote, where family lines “waver back and forth across color-lines like wet wash in a high March wind.” The city has given to America “more ‘passer pour blanches’ [people who pass for white] than any other city in our country.” A poet and scholar of black history, Christian anticipated much of the current academic interest in race as a social construction. (1) His meticulous histories of eighteenth—and nineteenth-century families recreated an era when racial lines were more fluid and southern society accepted—or at least expected—interracial sex. In the latter half of Christian’s career, as a civil rights struggle charged with anxieties about interracial contact swirled around him, his interests broadened to include the progeny of those early families. Among thousands of newspaper clippings that Christian saved over his lifetime—documenting New Orleans history from the protracted fight over school desegregation to the debate over stereotypical and degrading representations of Africans in Mardi Gras–one finds dozens of society photographs, wedding announcements, and obituaries that he compiled, seemingly in an attempt to discover a similar secret interracial history of the twentieth century. In the margins, he sometimes annotated genealogies, alternate spellings, or anecdotes about similar names encountered on the other side of the color line. In 1959, for example, he noted, and documented, the strange coincidence of a death notice for a man he thought was a “Negro,” who had died at an “all white” hospital, and speculated on the dead man’s familial relationship to a realtor listing a “colored” apartment a couple of weeks later. Of the family name in question, he later wrote to himself, “Joubert? What about the white family that says it spells its name ‘Jau’ and not ‘Jou’ [?]” Christian often wrote simply, as he did on a 1960 photograph of a couple cutting their fiftieth-anniversary cake, the word miscegenation. (2) The basis for such judgments was rarely explained. Perhaps it was a distant memory, a rumor, or merely Christian asserting his ability as a black man to spot passer pour blanches. Unfortunately he never published his side of these stories…

…Two striking conclusions emerge from an analysis of these records. First, Louisianans held much more complicated and historically contingent views of race than the statutes and court decisions alone would suggest. The legal adjudication of race in the twentieth century, as Pascoe has argued, historically had a complex, interdependent relationship with popular and scientific beliefs about race. This essay examines one aspect of that tension. By necessity, politics and the courts represented abstract law that could recognize only black and white, but the people who entered the courts worked with a more practical understanding that was also born of necessity. Most noteworthy about the testimony of people brought into Louisiana courts by miscegenation law is the fluidity and contextual nuance with which many people viewed race. In spite of the mid-twentieth century’s increasingly rigid lines of demarcation with regard to race, many ordinary Louisiana citizens instinctively understood and accepted the essentially social nature of racial definitions, and they worked with these definitions in the most private areas of their lives…

…Second, though miscegenation law frequently failed to prevent sex across the race line, it served another equally significant function in the twentieth century: a tool to monitor racial boundaries. Louisiana state law had often been able to tame and contain the contradictions of black and white, but by the mid-twentieth century, the demands of massive resistance increasingly brought about more ideological and less practical applications of jurisprudence. Official public records associated with essentially private and gendered actions such as birth and marriage became a gatekeeping mechanism for maintaining segregation in Louisiana schools, sports, and public conveyances. Government-employed bureaucrats carried out increasingly stringent investigations of once-routine applications for marriage licenses, death certificates, and birth certificates in order to police the boundaries of race and expose those who in the past might have “passed” as white or married across race lines. These private points of individual connection with the state, therefore, took on a substantial burden in the maintenance of racial boundaries, the punishment of miscegenation, and the defense of whiteness. The objective of anti-miscegenation law was ostensibly to discourage and punish sex across the race line, but it also permitted the state to use gender and private life to control the same boundary. In doing so, it made significant contributions to the redefinition of miscegenation and race itself.

Incidents of “race mixture” and white attempts to control such encounters have a long and infamous history in the South. Although prohibition of interracial sex was typically legislators’ stated objective, recent scholarship also underscores the deeply contextual nature of the statutes’ various incarnations. In colonial Virginia, where the earliest legislation on interracial liaisons appeared in 1662, the law reflected first the English conception of broadly defined racial hierarchy and later the social and economic dominance of explicitly racial slavery. At all times, colonial law addressed the reality of ongoing racial mixing, even as it represented what A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff have aptly described as “attempts to patch holes in the fabric of the system.” (10)

The solution, as Peter W. Bardaglio puts it, was a legal attempt “not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them” in directions that bolstered the slave system and existing racial and gender hierarchies. (11) While the specific definitions of the crime and punishment varied, as Charles Robinson notes, “In each colony a violation of the law required some party, man, woman, and/or child, to make restitution by sacrificing freedom.” Doubling the fine for interracial fornication, Virginia’s assembly, for example, declared in 1662 that an interracial child’s status would follow that of the mother. This ruling insured that the most common transgression of the color line–between black women and white men–would not undermine a social system increasingly based on a dichotomy between black slaves and free white persons. Maryland’s 1664 anti-miscegenation law did not proscribe marriage, but it declared that a white woman who married a slave would serve that slave’s master for the remainder of the husband’s life and that any offspring would be required to labor for the parish for thirty-one years. After 1692 in Maryland and 1725 in Pennsylvania, free black men who married white women were sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia enacted provisions similar to those of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (12) Colonial officials also singled out white women who had sex with black men for special punishment, a double standard that reflected, among other concerns, a perceived need both to control white female sexuality and to eliminate the threat that interracial offspring posed to the institution of slavery…

…In the early nineteenth century, as moral reformers encouraged the spread of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States, Louisiana law continued to reflect a greater preoccupation with racial hierarchy and property than with sex. In 1825, for example, the legislature revised the civil code to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers, prohibit children of color from claiming paternity from white fathers, and make it more difficult for biracial children to receive an inheritance by disallowing all but formal legal acknowledgement as a basis for establishing paternity. Through such measures Louisianans eliminated the old French laws governing support of children born within placage and protected the interests of white heirs from siblings of color. Interracial marriage remained illegal in the sense that it was legally invalid, but the law did not prescribe punishment for violators…

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Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity

Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies
Volume 4, Number 3
pages 377-404
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603259680

Bryant Keith Alexander, Acting Dean and Professor of Communication Studies
California State University, Los Angeles

This performative article uses the trope of “passing” as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions—passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of socially mediated expectations. All issues are centered within the specific concerns of Black masculine identity. In the process, the essay also seeks to establish the notion of an integrative ethnography of performance that envelops the critique of a performance as a part of the overall textual presentation of experience.

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