Mixed Race Studies

A tale of two scholars: The Darwin debate at Harvard

Harvard Gazette
2007-05-19

Louis Agassiz was a scientist with a blind spot—he rejected the theory of evolution

Few people have left a more indelible imprint on Harvard than Louis Agassiz.

An ambitious institution-builder and fundraiser as well as one of the most renowned scientists of his generation, he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) and trained a generation of naturalists in the precise methods of observation and categorization developed in Europe. His wife Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the other half of this Harvard power couple, was co-founder and first president of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, the precursor of Radcliffe.

Unfortunately, Agassiz chose the wrong side in what turned out to be the 19th century’s greatest scientific controversy, and as a result ended his career as something of an anachronism. The controversy was over Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” which was published in 1859 and soon won over the younger generation of scientists and intellectuals, including most of Agassiz’s students…

…Agassiz’s idea of nature was an essentially static one: God had placed the various species of plants and animals in specific places around the globe, and there they had remained, in the same forms and quantities as when they were first created. There was a hierarchy to organisms, but not an evolutionary one. Some were more complicated and advanced, but he did not believe as Darwin did that more complicated organisms evolved out of simpler ones.

Agassiz had similar ideas about humans. The five races of man were indigenous to specific sections of the earth. Highest in development were white Europeans. Lowest were black Africans. Agassiz took a very dim view of racial mixing.

In 1863, in a letter to Samuel Gridley Howe, appointed by Lincoln to head the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, Agassiz expressed his views on the matter: “Conceive for a moment the difference it would make in future ages for the prospect of republican institutions and our civilization generally, if instead of the manly population descended from cognate nations, the United States should hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood. In whatever proportion the amalgamation may take place, I shudder at the consequences.”…

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Existing in a Third World: The unique biracial educational experience

California State University, Long Beach
December 2007
90 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1451152
ISBN: 9780549405887

Ashley Benjamin

A Thesis Presented to the Department of Educational Psychology, Administration, and Counseling California State University, Long Beach In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Education

The purpose of this study is to explore the educational experience of the Black/White biracial student in order for educators to become better informed about the challenges that biracial students face during their educational years. In order to accomplish this task, data were collected through open-ended interviews and questionnaires and analyzed using a combination of “closed” and “open” coding techniques.

The results of this study indicated that biracial students have a unique educational experience and that racism and racial segregation are still a problem in today’s educational settings. The findings, in addition to the literature, also demonstrates the many challenges biracial students face within the educational context, thus making them potentially at risk for various emotional, social, and academic problems.

Order the dissertation here.

Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. President

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Volume 35, Number 4 (Winter 2010)
E-ISSN: 1553-1201 Print ISSN: 0885-0429
pages 334-356

Philip Nel, Professor of English
Kansas State University

In a column published five days after the 2008 election, journalist Jason Whitlock said of the president-elect’s life: “His is a tale that should be read aloud at bedtime in every American neighborhood.” It was already being read aloud in some neighborhoods. Even before Senator Obama had won the election, there were twelve juvenile titles about his life: two picture books, nine chapter books, and one comic book. From the election to the end of his first year in office, another forty-seven books were published: thirty-six more chapter books, seven more picture books, two comic books, one book of poetry, and one board book. And that doesn’t include the Obama Paper Dolls book, coloring and activity books, the titles about Bo the dog, nor the many books about Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.

To have this many children’s books about a candidate—or about a president so soon in his term of office—is unusual. During the campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had seven titles to Obama’s twelve: five chapter books, one comic book, and one picture book (My Dad, John McCain, written by his daughter Meghan McCain). During George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, there were two juvenile titles about him. By the end of the first year of his presidency, add another four. By the end of his eight-year presidency, Bush inspired twenty-nine fewer books than Obama did in his first year—thirty titles in all, and that includes one anti-Bush satire, Dan Piraro’s The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (2004). The marked difference in tone between the Bush book titles and the Obama book titles suggest that publishers and authors see the forty-fourth president quite differently from the forty-third…

Read or purchase the article here.

Miscegenation and Race: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [A Tribute]

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 1-5
E-ISSN: 1536-0334, Print ISSN: 0160-9009

Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

The following papers pay tribute to Peggy Pascoe’s [1954-2010] extraordinary book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. They originated at a session held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January 2010 to explore the implications of Pascoe’s work for current histories of race and gender. Sitting in the audience, I enjoyed not only the roundtable but also the deep pleasure evident on Pascoe’s face as she listened to the presentations and to the discussion of the influence of her book on our scholarship and our teaching. Peggy Pascoe always makes us think harder, in her gentle and affirming ways. This session gave her a taste of the rewards sown by her latest scholarly achievement. I could sense that day that I shared with others in attendance a sense of pride and vicarious gratification that so treasured a colleague should be recognized in this way.

Both sweeping and detailed, What Comes Naturally constructs the dual histories of the criminalization of interracial marriage and the resistance to that process by individuals and social movements, spanning the century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Since its publication in 2009 the book has been widely honored. It has received both the Hawley Prize and the Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, both the Dunning and the Kelly Prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. The range of subjects covered by these awards is telling: economy, politics, or institutions; cultural history; women’s history or feminist theory; American history; sociolegal history. In short, this is a book that has already had a profound effect on the profession across its many specializations…

Articles

Legal Fictions Exposed
pages 6-14

Eileen Boris, Eileen Boris Hull Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law
pages 15-21

Jacki Thompson Rand, Associate Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

“The Relics of Slavery”: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South
pages 22-30

Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Nikki Sawada Bridges Flynn and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 31-40

Valerie J. Matsumoto, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Therapeutic Culture and Marriage Equality: What Comes Naturally and Contemporary Dialogues about Marriage
pages 41-48

Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
City University of New York, Queens College

Social Movements, the Rise of Colorblind Conservativism, and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 49-59

Matt Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality

University of Texas Press
December 2010
183 pages
62 b&w illus, 14 color photos
7 x 10 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-72324-5

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer
Foreword by Ben Vinson III

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ben Vinson III
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Framing African Performance in Mexico
• Chapter 2: Masked Dances: Devils and Beasts of the Costa Chica
• Chapter 3: Archetypes of Race: Performance Responses to Afro-Mexican Presence
• Chapter 4: Becoming National: Chilena, Artesa, and Jarocho as Folkloric Dances
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality, as the title suggests, is a book about dancing. But more important, it is a book about how dance reflects on social histories and relationships. The photographs and text document how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. The idea of Afro-Mexico is, in some ways, an enigma. While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves either black or African. Instead, members of this ethnic population blend into the national imagination of Mexico as a mixed-race country. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This construct obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal that African people and their cultural productions have consistently influenced Mexican society…

…Race in the Americas

The concept of race is continually being redefined. “Race” troubles academic theorists and affects popular social conceptions about origins and nationality. Political events like the rise of Barack Obama challenge existing myths about race and bring to questions the realities of racial mixtures in the Americas. In both local and global communities public understandings about blackness greatly influence who African Diaspora people think they are. Clearly, those who reside in Mexico are Mexican. However, self-perceptions influence both self-esteem and the sense of belonging. Recently, I was traveling by airplane to Costa Chica and picked up a copy of the magazine Intro*, which services the Oaxacan coast. Inside was a story about a surfer named Angel Salinas, an Afro-Mexican from Mancuernas, Pinotepa Nacional. Salinas is a surfing star who has won national and international tournaments. But he wears a wrestler’s mask to cover his face when he appears in public. The article states that the surfer wears the mask as “a result of some advice that his mother gave him when he didn’t appear in magazines because of his dark skin; he decided to do something that would make him different and that would show a Mexican cultural icon. Now he is known as ‘the masked surfer.'” Angel Salinas feels the need to cover his face in order to feel Mexican. Although Mexico is a country where, at first glance, the races have mixed to become a “cosmic race,” there are still urgent social discrepancies that manifest as internalized or blatant racism. This discrepancy between public policy and daily practices influences the kinds of lives that contemporary Afro-Mexicans lead…

4203W-01 – Racial Passing, Masquerade, and Transformation in African American Literature, Law, Film, and Culture

University of Connecticut
Fall 2010

Martha Cutter, Associate Professor of English

What is “race”? What is “whiteness”? What is “blackness”? What does it mean to be “mixed-race” or “multi-racial” in the US? This course will examine what racial passing—people who transform themselves from one race to another—can tell us about the meaning of race itself. Our methodology will be chronological as we test the idea that texts about passing and racial transformation both highlight, but also perhaps undermine, ideas about the meaning of race in a particular cultural and historical moment. Our focus will mainly be on twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations of racial passing and transformation, although we will also look at some earlier texts to get a sense of how ideas of race have changed over time. Our examination will also include scientific and legal texts which help us understand the meaning of blackness, whiteness, and race.

Texts: Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Nella Larsen, Passing; George Schuyler, Black No More; Randall Kennedy, Sellout; Danzy Senna, Life on the Color Line; Spike Lee (Director), Bamboozled; Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America; Barbara Koenig, ed. Revising Race in a Genomic Age (Excerpts); other readings on racial science.

For more information, click here.

English 39695-001 ST: Racial Crossings

Kent State University
2006

Martha Cutter, Associate Professor of English

This course will examine literary and cultural treatments of individuals, authors, and characters who cross from one race to another, and sometimes also from one gender to another. This crossing may be metaphorical—for example, a white writer may attempt to write from the point of view of an African American character or a Native American character may try to “transcend” his or her race through various means. This crossing may also be actual—someone who is white may “pass” for black, or someone who is black may “pass” for white. We will look at novels, short stories, poems and films as cultural texts that depict racial crossing and passing. We will ask what these texts tell us about the way race is constructed and configured in society, culture, history, and the law. We will also attempt to understand how artists both assist and resist social and cultural constructions of the meaning of “race.” Does racial crossing fundamentally undermine or stabilize the meaning of “race”?

For more information, click here.

Media and Performance in Racial Passing: 2007 Heterodox Identities – LCST 2007 A

Eugene Lang College
The New School for Liberal Arts
Spring 2009

Orville Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Racial passing is a ubiquitous and contentious feature of social and cultural life in the United States. Taking “passing” as an object of analysis, this course is organized around the question of whether social identity should be understood as a set of essential characteristics or as a type of “performance.” Readings and discussions center on the conceptualization of race; the dynamics and meaning of racial passing; the movement for the recognition of biracial identities; and the question of racial “authenticity” and the politics of the self. The case of racial passing is also compared to other cases of heterodox identity involving gender, sexuality, and social class.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
2004
248 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 1578066670 (9781578066674)
Paper ISBN: 9781604732481

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

An examination of race and audience in an American innovator’s writings

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt’s novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt’s lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience.

Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience.

Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt’s career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt’s views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt’s unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America’s most significant writers on the subject.

Between boxes

the Burr
Kent State University
Fall 2005
pages 50-55

Story by Jessica Rothschuh
Photo illustration by Clarissa Westmeyer
Photos by Lauren Arendt

For some multiracial students, college becomes a time to discover their heritages and shape their identities

HER DARK HAIR IS PULLED BACK IN BRAIDS, LEAVING HER FACE OPEN, TWO large, dark eyes peering out from long eyelashes. Her skin is a warm almond color. Her ethnicity is hard to put a finger on. She could pass as Hispanic or Native American.

Jalayna Nadal, freshman Latin American studies major from Edinboro, Pa., is both. Her father is black and Cherokee, and her mother is Puerto Rican and white.

Developing her multicultural identity has been a lifelong process for Nadal, and college is a time to further explore her multiple heritages, shaping her cultural identity as she learns more about herself and her roots.

For biracial and multiracial students like Nadal, college may prove both exciting and difficult. Mixed-race students in particular can experience an intense desire to discover their heritages and create their racial identities, but they also can feel pressure to define themselves. For the first time, students are searching for identities outside the environment in which they were raised, without the constant support of family…

…College is another step away from his culture, Isaacs says. “Because I’m not around my father as much, I don’t assert my Hawaiian identity as much.” Here, he hasn’t found a place he really fits in, and when he returns to Hawaii, it is hard to feel he still belongs there, either. “You’re just stuck in limbo,” Isaacs says. “You have to be kind of like a cultural chameleon in a sense.” Isaacs says he adapts his identity to those around him, and it is easy for him to blend in because he looks white.

For some biracial students, however, being a chameleon is hard. “The problem that they face saying, ‘I am biracial,’ is other people saying, ‘No, you’ve got to choose,’ ” says Angela Neal-Barnett, associate professor and research psychologist. “With biracial adolescents, you get two things happening: They choose to identify with one race or they choose to develop a biracial identity.”

For more than five years, Neal-Barnett has been studying the phenomenon of “white acting” in minority adolescents. Through her research, she has talked with biracial youth, most of whom are primarily black and white. “One’s skin color can run the gamut, and one’s hair color and texture can run the gamut. You have students who look white, but their racial identity is black or biracial,” she says. In fact, the biracial adolescents Neal-Barnett has spoken with almost always choose to identify as black or biracial. Very few identify as white…

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