Mixed Race Studies

Brass Ankles Speak

Essays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
circa 1929

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

Prefatory Note by Gloria T. Hull

Entitled “Brass Ankles Speaks” (Vol. 2, WADN), it is an outspoken denunciation of darker skinned black people’s prejudice against light-skinned blacks told by a “brass ankles,” a black person “white enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.” This brass ankles recalls her “miserable” childhood in “a far Southern city” where other schoolchildren taunted and plagued her because she was a “light nigger, with straight hair!” This kind of rebuff and persecution continued into a Northern college and her first teaching job:

Small wonder, then, that the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked or not. But when we began going about together and spending time in each other’s society, a howl went up. We were organizing a “blue vein” society. We were mistresses of white men. We were Lesbians. We hated black folk and plotted against them. As a matter of fact, we had no other recourse but to cling together.

And she states further that “To complain would be only to bring upon themselves another storm of abuse and fury.”

This essay was as close as Dunbar-Nelson ever got to revealing feelings about her own racial status as a “yaller nigger.” She tried to publish it, but would not or could not do so under her own name, and the magazine editor refused to print it pseudonymously.

Brass Ankles Speaks (circa 1929)

The “Race” question is paramount. A cloud of books, articles and pronunciamentos on the subject of the white man or girl who “passes” over to the other side of the racial fence, and either entirely forsakes his or her own race, to live in terror or misery all their days, or else come crawling back to do uplift work among their own people, hovers on the literary horizon. On the other hand, there is an increasing interest and sentimentality concerning the poor, pitiful black girl, whose life is a torment among her own people, because of their “blue vein” proclivities. It seems but fair and just now for some of the neglected light-skinned colored people, who have not “passed” to rise and speak a word in self-defense.

I am of the latter class, what E. C. Adams in “Nigger to Nigger” immortalizes in the poem, “Brass Ankles.” White enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.

My earliest recollections are miserable ones. I was born in a far Southern city, where complexion did, in a manner of speaking, determine one’s social status. However, the family being poor, I was sent to the public school. It was a heterogeneous mass of children which greeted my frightened eyes on that fateful morning in September, when I timidly took my place in the first grade. There were not enough seats for all the squirming mass of little ones, so the harassed young, teacher—I have reason to believe now that this was her first school—put me on the platform at her feet. I was so little and scared and homesick that it made no impression on me at the time. But at the luncheon hour I was assailed with shouts of derision—“Yah! Teacher’s pet! Yah! Just cause she’s yaller!” Thus at once was I initiated into the class of the disgraced, which has haunted and tormented my whole life— “Light nigger, with straight hair!”

This was the beginning of what was for nearly six years a life of terror, horror and torment. For in this monster public school, which daily disgorged about 2,500 children, there were all shades and tints and degrees of complexions from velvet black to blonde white. And the line of demarcation was rigidly drawn—not by the fairer children, but by the darker ones. I had no color sense. In my family we never spoke of it. Indian browns and cafe au laits, were mingled with pale bronze and blonde yellows all in one group of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. For so peculiarly does the Mendelian law work in mixed bloods, that four children of two parents may show four different degrees of mixture, brown, yellow, tan, blonde.

In the school, therefore, I felt at first the same freedom concerning color. So I essayed friendship with Esther. Esther was velvet dark, with great liquid eyes. She could sing, knew lots of forbidden lore, and brought lovely cakes for luncheon. Therefore I loved Esther, and would have been an intimate friend of hers. But she repulsed me with ribald laughter—“Half white nigger! Go on wid ya kind!”, and drew up a solid phalanx of little dark girls, who thumbed noses at me and chased me away from their ring game on the school playground…

Read the entire essay here.

Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity

Journal of Homosexuality
Volume 26, Issue 2 & 3 (December 1993)
pages 1-20
DOI: 10.1300/J082v26n02_01

Marylynne Diggs

“Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity” cautions against the risks of metaphorical imperialism in readings of codified gay and lesbian representation. Taking issue with Foucault’s suggestion that the secret of the nineteenth century was the secret of sex, I suggest that, in the nineteenth-century American culture, where African-American identity and equality were among the most controversial issues of the century, the secrets of identity were secrets of race as well. Because scientific and literary representations of pathological and/or secret, essential identities are sites of intersection in the discources of homosexual and mixed-race identity, they should be investigated as intersections, rather than read as codifications of sexual difference. Surveying the discourses of scientific racism, genetics, and eugenics, and doing readings of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Stones of the Village, I suggest that Harper’s representation of the mulatto leader can be read as an act of resistance to the representation of the mulatto as a degenerate, hybrid species; and that in Dunbar-Nelson’s story, the thematics of passing, secrecy, and the fear of detection, while having a recognizable homoerotic quality, should not be read simply as a codification of homosexual difference and panic. I conclude with a call for more work on historicizing the intersection of racial and sexual identity in the discouces of pathology and degeneration.

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The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

Peter Lang
1998
142 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8204-4265-5

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

How and when does literature most effectively uncover race to be a metaphor? The passing figure, a light-skinned African-American capable and willing to pass for white, provides the thematic focus to this provocative study. In exploring the social and cultural history of this distinctly American phenomenon, Bennett moves freely between literature, film, and music, arguing that the passing figure is crucial to our understanding of past and present conceptions of race.

Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

Biography
Volume 23, Number 4 (Fall 2000)
pages 670-693
E-ISSN: 1529-1456 Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0043

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

Langston Hughes, “Desire”

At the very beginning of his career and throughout most of his forty years of writing, Langston Hughes repeatedly returned to the theme of racial passing, exploring the subject in two autobiographies, several poems and short stories, a brief scene in his first novel, and at least one play. More than those writers who could easily pass for white—Jean Toomer and Walter White—and more than those writers who have become central to the growing study of passing literature—Nella Larsen and William Faulkner—Langston Hughes examines this figure through all the major genres, and more importantly, with an incredible range and inventiveness. In surveying the work, however, it becomes apparent that Hughes began to abandon the theme of racial passing just as he was beginning to explore the interrelated themes of homosexuality and homophobia. As Hughes moves to this “new” material, he can be found structuring it, perhaps as many authors do, upon his early work, with the more familiar drama of racial passing informing his approach to homosexuality. Perhaps less obvious are the ways that the early representations of racial passing, including…

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Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer, 2004)
pages 768-787
E-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0136

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash’s feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rights- era race and gender relations and identity formations. Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film. Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregiilora, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands. located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatto characters—“racially mixed” women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of “race mixing”—into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and racial normativity. Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-American literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance lllustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hopkins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and Jessie Fauset There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy American Style ( 1933). mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through “racial passing.”…

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Race Passing and American Individualism

University of Massachusetts Press
February 2003
176 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand)

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture

In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for white embody a paradox. By virtue of the “one drop” rule that long governed the nation’s race relations, they are legally black. Yet the color of their skin makes them visibly-and therefore socially-white.

In this book, Kathleen Pfeiffer explores the implications of this dilemma by analyzing its treatment in the fiction of six writers: William Dean Howells, Frances E. W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Although passing for white has sometimes been viewed as an expression of racial self-hatred or disloyalty, Pfeiffer argues that the literary evidence is much more ambiguous than that. Rather than indicating a denial of “blackness” or co-optation by the dominant white culture, passing can be viewed as a form of self-determination consistent with American individualism. In their desire to manipulate personal identity in order to achieve social acceptance and upward mobility, light-skinned blacks who pass for white are no different than those Americans who reinvent themselves in terms of class, religion, or family history.

In Pfeiffer’s view, to see race passing as a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of individualism is to invite richer and more complex readings of a broad range of literary texts. More than that, it represents a challenge to the segregationist logic of the “one drop” rule and, as such, subverts the ideology of racial essentialism.

New NAACP Leader Looks Ahead

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2008-05-20

Michel Martin, Host

Benjamin Jealous is the new president of the NAACP. Jealous, a former news executive and lifelong human rights activist, discusses his new post and the ever-changing role of the NAACP in the civil rights movement.

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I’m Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. In a moment, the Mocha Moms on going green as a family. They’ll talk about ways to get started. And things never to say to Asian-American colleagues. We start our series on how to be mindful of the sensibilities of others in our increasingly diverse workplaces.

But first, one of the country’s oldest civil rights organizations gets a new leader. The NAACP chose a new president on Saturday, 35-year-old human rights activists Benjamin Todd Jealous. He will be the youngest president ever in the history of the 99-year-old civil rights organization. His election comes after the organization tries to recover from a period of internal strife to engage a new generation of members and to refocus its mission. Ben Jealous joins us now to talk about his new post and hopefully a little bit about himself. Welcome to the program. Congratulations.

Mr. BEN JEALOUS (President, NAACP): Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: You’ve had a couple of days to take it all in. Can you describe what it means to lead this historic organization founded by giants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells Barnett.

Mr. JEALOUS: Those two are a big deal to me. I come out of the black press, that’s how I learned how to do what I did for Amnesty [International], and so it’s extremely humbling. You know, at the same time, as a parent of a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl, I’m extremely impatient and want to focus on the now, you know, want to focus on the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline and on making sure that this great association is as important in the 21st century as it was in the last century…

…MARTIN: Your profile is a bit different from past leaders in a number of respects—I mean, the fact that you are not a minister or a politician. One other interesting thing about you is that you are also biracial, as is Barak Obama, as is the lieutenant Governor [Anthony G. Brown] of Maryland, as is the mayor [Adrian Fenty] of Washington.

Mr. JEALOUS: Can I, can I make a small correction there?

MARTIN: Of course.

Mr. JEALOUS: I’m black. You know, the only thing that we have, you know, the only definition that’s out there on the books, if you will, are state laws, and my family is from Virginia. When I was born it said, the law said that you had to be 1/32nd, excuse me, if you were at least 1/32nd of African descent, you were black, end of story. White was an exclusive definition, black was an inclusive definition. I do have biracial parentage but quite frankly…

MARTIN: You don’t consider yourself biracial.

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean, I don’t understand it, I mean the… my grandmother’s much fairer than I am, has straight hair. You know, the reality is that, you know, our family, like most families were sort of created in the Jeffersonian model. You know, we were raped on Virginia plantations, and you know, all of those kids were black.

MARTIN: But your parents weren’t? I mean, that’s not your parents.

Mr. JEALOUS: Yeah, right but what I’m saying is that…

MARTIN: What I’m curious about though is that, is there something, is there an important cultural moment here, or not?

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean you know, yeah it is significant, I think the most significant thing about my parents is that you know, a year after their marriage was illegal, it was made legal because of the work of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund.

You know, my parents—when they were married in Washington, D.C., in 1966, they had to be married there because they couldn’t get married where they lived in Baltimore. When they drove back for the party in Baltimore, people pulled off the side of the road, took off their hat because they thought it was a funeral procession passing, because there was a Cadillac in front of a bunch of cars with their lights on.

So, you know, and my father was disowned not by his two brothers or his mom, but by the entire rest of his family. And his family was in Salem in 1636, and they’re a big family. And they disowned him, not because they didn’t believe that he loved my mom. You know, his great uncle, I mean my great uncle drove out, sat down with them, said we believe that you love this woman, but you know I’m a man, I know a man can love many women, and you need to fall out of love quick or you’re going to be out of this family.

So, you know, the notion biracial I just think is blunt and crude and ahistorical, and to say biracial parentage, of course. I completely, you know, I’ve done more research on my father’s history, I think, on all the white cousins that I’m in touch with, and the ones who didn’t disown us were much in touch with, I love very much, if you know somebody named Jealous it’s probably one of them…

Read the entire transcript here.  Listen to the episode here (00:17:13).

Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

Pennsylvania State University
December 2006
285 pages
AAT: 3343682
ISBN: 9780549992738

Khadidiatou Gueye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
  • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
  • Introduction
  • Black/White Polarization
  • Racial Hybridity
  • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
• Chapter Two
  • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
  • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
  • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
• Chapter Three
  • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
  • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
• Chapter Four
  • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
  • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
  • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter Five
  • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
  • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
  • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Skin, race and space: the clash of bodily schemas in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Nella Larsen’s Passing

Cultural Geographies
Volume 18, Number 1 (2011-01-06)
pages 25-41
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010379953

Steve Pile, Professor of Human Geography
The Open University, United Kingdom

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing offers the opportunity to reconsider the relationship between race and space. The novel provides an account of space that is highly racialized. It describes 1920s Chicago as having heavily proscribed white and black spaces. However, race itself is far more uncertain. The novel’s two main characters, Irene and Clare, though black by blood in US American racial schematics, are both able to pass as white. Their skin colour renders their race ultimately unknowable: they can easily cross the borders between the white and the black world. By using Frantz Fanon’s notions of corporeal schemas and epidermal schemas, and by focusing on skin itself, it is possible to open up another way of seeing race and space in the novel. The paper argues that these bodily schemas ultimately clash, and come to grief, in the novel. Even so, this clash of bodily schemas enables a possible resolution to the problem of seeing the body either through black/white grids of signification and power, or through their aggregation into phenotypes or races. In this view, bodily schemas may come to define race and space, but never exclusively in one way or another.

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Passage to identity is still a struggle

Kansas City Star
2010-12-17

Commentary by: Jeneé Osterheldt

I’ve always known I wasn’t white like my mama. Even as a little girl, I could feel adults stare as we passed by.

I was different. But was I black like my daddy? It took me much of my young life to figure that out.

Earlier this year, we took the census. The hardest of the 10 questions revolved around racial identity.

President Barack Obama, born to a white mother and a black father from Africa, checked one box: Black, African Am. or Negro.

I checked it, too. But I also marked the ones next to white and Native American. The president and I are both mixed.

So, who chose the right answer?

More and more black-and-white mixed Americans are “passing” for black, according to a recent study in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, titled “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans.” That’s a reverse form of what biracial and fair-skinned blacks did in the Jim Crow era, when they denied their race altogether.

It’s claptrap. Yes, Obama is mixed, but he’s also black. It’s possible to be both. How can people “pass” for something they already are?..

Read the rest of the commentary here.