Mixed Race Studies

Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

Journal of Family Nursing
(2006)
Vol. 12, No. 1
Pages 22-37
DOI: 10.1177/1074840705285213

Marcia Marie Byrd, PhD, RN
College of St. Catherine

Ann Williams Garwick, PhD, RN, LP, LMFT, FAAN
University of Minnesota

The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to describe how eight Black-White couples with school-aged children constructed their interracial family identity through developmental transitions and interpreted race to their children. Within and across-case data analytic strategies were used to identify commonalities and variations in how Black men and White women in couple relationships formed their family identities over time. Coming together was the core theme described by the Black-White couples as they negotiated the process of forming a family identity. Four major tasks in the construction of interracial family identity emerged: (a) understanding and resolving family of origin chaos and turmoil, (b) transcending Black-White racial history, (c) articulating the interracial family’s racial standpoint, and (d) explaining race to biracial children across the developmental stages. The findings guide family nurses in promoting family identity formation as a component of family health within the nurse-family partnership with Black-White mixed-race families.

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
by Kathryn Talalay
Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

…Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

Read the entire book review here.

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America

University of Nebraska Press
2002
396 pages
Illus., map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6194-5

Edited by

James F. Brooks, President and Chief Executive Officer
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Confounding the Color Line is an essential, interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad relationships forged for centuries between Indians and Blacks in North America. Since the days of slavery, the lives and destinies of Indians and Blacks have been entwined-thrown together through circumstance, institutional design, or personal choice. Cultural sharing and intermarriage have resulted in complex identities for some members of Indian and Black communities today.

The contributors to this volume examine the origins, history, various manifestations, and long-term consequences of the different connections that have been established between Indians and Blacks. Stimulating examples of a range of relations are offered, including the challenges faced by Cherokee freedmen, the lives of Afro-Indian whalers in New England, and the ways in which Indians and Africans interacted in Spanish colonial New Mexico. Special attention is given to slavery and its continuing legacy, both in the Old South and in Indian Territory. The intricate nature of modern Indian-Black relations is showcased through discussions of the ties between Black athletes and Indian mascots, the complex identities of Indians in southern New England, the problem of Indian identity within the African American community, and the way in which today’s Lumbee Indians have creatively engaged with African American church music.

At once informative and provocative, Confounding the Color Line sheds valuable light on a pivotal and not well understood relationship between these communities of color, which together and separately have affected, sometimes profoundly, the course of American history.

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Health and Behavior Risks of Adolescents with Mixed-Race Identity

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 93, Number 11 (November 2003)
Pages 1865-1870

J. Richard Udry, PhD, Kenan Professor of Maternal and Child Health and Sociology
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Rose Maria Li, PhD
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Janet Hendrickson-Smith, MA
Analytical Sciences, Inc.

Objectives. This study compared the health and risk status of adolescents who identify with 1 race with those identifying with more than 1 race.

Methods. Data are derived from self-reports of race, using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which provides a large representative national sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Respondents could report more than 1 race.

Results. Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables.

Conclusions. Adolescents who self-identify as more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks. The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress.

Read the entire article here.

“We Have Always Been:” Mixed Race Experiences in the USA and French Polynesian (Tahitian) Contexts: 2010 Exploration Seminar in Tahiti

University of Washington Exploration Seminars
Dates of Instruction: 2010-08-22 through 2010-09-10

Program Director: Steve Woodard and Alejandro Espania (Minority Affairs)

Ia Ora Na, friend!  Please know that this three (3) week seminar will take place in Tahiti, one of 130 main islands within the French Polynesian archipelago.   The dates for this seminar are August 22, 2010 through September 10, 2010. Participants should plan to participate in a pre-seminar, which will take place during the latter part of Spring Quarter 2010 at the University of Washington.

We invite you to join us as we traverse through, and push upon the boundaries of, the system of knowledge collectively referred to in the literature as multiracial theory.  Our expected resources include seminal and newly published texts about the mixed race experience, as well as the participants’ (and instructors’) own respective personal narratives.  Both ways of knowing will be routinely explored via purposeful dialogues, structured self-reflections, and organized large/small group and one-on-one community interactions…

For more information, click here.

Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:40 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

Chinese men arrived in Mexico after Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Chinese concentrated in the north due to its proximity to the United States and opportunities in the developing economy. Chinese men forged a variety of ties with Mexicans including romantic liaisons with Mexican women. Anti-Chinese campaigns emerged in the border state Sonora during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Spreading rapidly and gaining tremendous power, the movement reached its zenith during the Great Depression when the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Overlapping partially with Mexican “repatriation,” a mass expulsion of Chinese occurred in Sonora and its southern neighbor Sinaloa. Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children accompanied Chinese men for a variety of reasons. Some Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families departed Sonora and Sinaloa through Mexican ports. Others traversed the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, landing in the custody of U.S. Immigration Service agents who, in enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, jailed and deported them to China. Complicating international relations, the United States accused officials in Sonora of violating its immigration laws by forcing Chinese across its border. Mexican Chinese families faced great challenges in their new locations in Guangdong province. While some families remained unified, others broke apart. The Mexican Chinese families, congregated in Portuguese Macau. The colony’s Catholic and Iberian culture was similar to Mexico’s and the Mexican Chinese found niches. Over time, they created a coherent enclave whose web extended to British Hong Kong as well as Guangdong. The concept of the “Mexican homeland” gained increasing salience in the context of great flux in mid-twentieth-century China. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” over time and from abroad as they struggled to return to Mexico. Following these families across borders and oceans, this paper examines larger questions of nationalism and “diasporas.”

Patterns of Mixed-Race Migration to Britain in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 15:10 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

With tremendous gender and racial disparities, miscegenation and interracial cohabitation became the norm in eighteenth-century Jamaica.  A large number of mixed-race children came from these unions, and in many cases these individuals received financial and personal assistance from their white fathers.  Lacking schools, and with almost no professional prospects for free people of color on the island, many fathers sent their mixed-race children to Britain for a better chance at schooling and employment.  These individuals took their place in the upper ranks of metropolitan society, with large colonial fortunes behind them.  Their interactions with white relatives, and scholarly success in Britain, paved the way for continued achievement in the metropole, or for a more advanced position in Jamaican society, if they chose to return. This paper examines the wills of over 2200 Jamaican residents from 1770-1815 to provide a quantifiable look at mixed-race migration to Britain.  Gathered from the Island Record Office in Central Village, Jamaica, these wills shed light not only on the frequency and regularity of this practice over the period in question, but also on the gender and class dynamics that dictated life for mixed-race Jamaicans who traveled to the metropole.  Though primarily a male phenomenon, mixed-race migration to Britain also included a large number of women who, more often than their male counterparts, stayed in the metropolis permanently.  This paper will argue that such movement became an important component in the development of the Black Atlantic, and that the remigration of mixed-race Jamaicans from the metropole to the periphery constituted a vital force in the creolization of the West Indies.

Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1910s-1960s

2009 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2009-06-11 through 2009-06-14

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

On May 12, 1960, the Mexican Chinese community leader in Macau, Ramón Lay Mazo, wrote to a prominent Mexican widow, Doña Concepción Rodríguez Viuda de Aragón, in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Seeking her continued support for the Mexican Chinese repatriation cause, he conveyed the deep, devoted love Mexican women living in China felt for their nation, Mexico. When he asked Mexican women in China whether they wanted to move to other countries, they replied, “Ni que me den un palacio allá, prefiero México, aunque vaya a vivir bajo un mesquite” (“Not even if they gave me a palace there, I prefer Mexico, even if I have to live under a mesquite”). Disheartened by the Mexican government’s disregard for them and their desperate situations, Ramón tried to convince Mexican women to consider living elsewhere. He warned them that Mexico might not be the same as it once was and that it might be more difficult to survive in the communities where they had once lived. To this the women rejoined, “Aunque vayamos a escarbar camotes amargos a la sierra, queremos México” (“Even if we have to dig for bitter sweet potatoes in the sierra, we want Mexico”). The conditions, where in the nation they might live, and how long they might have to wait were no matter. They wanted to return to the Mexican homeland they had longed for since years past…

Read the entire paper here.