Mixed Race Studies

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

W. W. Norton
May 2006
240 pages
5.8 × 8.6 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-05890-1

Kym Ragusa, Professor of Nonfiction &  Professor Writing
Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Inistitute of Technology

A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty.

Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2008
800 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
6.5 × 9.6 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
816 pages
6.1 × 9.2 in

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative

Indiana University Press
2007-12-04
272 pages
30 b&w photos, 6.125 x 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34944-6
ISBN: 0-253-34944-3

Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass’s mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter‘s ceramics, the book identifies a “fugitive vision” that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Looking Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon
• Part 1. Fugitive Gender: Black Mothers, White Faces, Sanguine Sons
  1. Racing and Erasing the Slave Mother: Frederick Douglass, Parodic Looks, and Ethnographic Illustration
  2. Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism)
  3. The Uses in Seeing: Mobilizing the Portrait in Drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Part 2. Still Moving: Revamped Technologies of Surveillance
  1. Panoramic Bodies: From Banvard‘s Mississippi to Brown’s Iron Collar
  2. The Mulatta in the Camera: Harriet Jacobs’s Historicist Gazing and Dion Boucicault‘s Mulatta Obscura
  3. Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

The American Historical Review
2005
Volume 110, Number 2

Saliha Belmessous, Research Fellow of History
University of Syndey

Although the idea of race is increasingly being historicized, its emergence in the context of French colonization remains shadowy. This is despite the fact that colonization was central to the emergence of race in French culture. The French are either credited with a generous vision and treatment of Amerindians or they are kept in limbo. The publication of Richard White’s Middle Ground in 1991 shook up these conventional ideas by showing that French conciliation toward indigenous peoples had to be explained by particular political and economic factors rather than by national character. Yet the issue of race has remained almost untouched, and French America has still not taken its place in the current debate about race, color, and civility.

The present essay is an empirical contribution to the discussion on the origins of European racialism as applied to colonial situations. It argues that racial prejudice in colonial Canada emerged only after an assimilationist approach had been tried for almost a century and had failed. In the seventeenth century, French policy toward the indigenous peoples of New France relied on the assimilation of the natives to French religion and culture. The aim was to mix colonial and native peoples in order to strengthen the nascent New France. This policy of francisation (sometimes translated as “Frenchification”) was based on a paternalistic vision of cultural difference: the French officials viewed the Amerindians as “savages,” socially, economically, and culturally inferior to the Europeans. As such, they had to be educated and brought to civility. This policy remained the official “native policy” employed throughout the period of the French regime in Canada despite the internal tensions and contradictions displayed by French officials. Historians have traditionally emphasized the implementation of this policy by missionaries and, consequently, have neglected or, at best, diminished the significance of francisation for civil authorities. The conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was undoubtedly an important part of the policy of francisation, but that importance has been overstated: francisation was more a political program than a religious one. An understanding of the central role played by the state in the promotion of the policy of assimilation has profound consequences for our comprehension of the relations between the French and Amerindians…

Read the entire article here.

Bi-racial U.S.A. vs. Multi-racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?

Journal of Latin American Studies
Volume 25, Issue 2 (May 1993)
pages 373-386
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X00004703

Thomas E. Skidmore, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of History Emeritus
Brown University

In the last two decades the comparative analysis of race relations in the U.S.A. and Brazil has been based on a conventional wisdom. It is the corollary of a larger conventional wisdom in the study of comparative race relations. The thesis is that systems of race relations in the Western Hemisphere are primarily of two types: bi-racial and multi-racial. The distinction is normally spelled out as follows. The U.S.A. is a prime example of a bi-racial system. In the prevailing logic of the US legal and social structure, individuals have historically been either black or white. In Brazil, on the other hand, there has been a spectrum of racial distinctions. At a minimum, Brazilian social practice has recognised white, black and mulatto. At a maximum, the phenotypical distinctions have become so refined as to defy analysis, or effective application for those who would discriminate.

Mestizo Modernism

Rutgers University Press
2003
280 pages
21 b&w illus.
Paper ISBN 0-8135-3217-5
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3216-7

Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor and Women’s Studies
University of Florida, Gainesville

We use the term “modernism” almost exclusively to characterize the work of European and American writers and artists who struggled to portray a new kind of fractured urban life typified by mechanization and speed. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Latin American artists were similarly engaged-but with a difference. While other modernists drew from “primitive” cultures for an alternative sense of creativity, Latin American modernists were taking a cue from local sources-primarily indigenous and black populations in their own countries. In Mestizo Modernism Tace Hedrick focuses on four key artists who represent Latin American modernism-Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hedrick interrogates what being “modern” and “American” meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked, as well as the formal methods they shared, including the connection they drew between ancient cultures and modern technologies. This look at Latin American artists will force the reconceptualization of what modernism has meant in academic study and what it might mean for future research.

Table of Contents

MESTIZO MODERNISM
SENTIMENTAL MEN
WOMEN’S WORK
BROTHER MEN
CHILDLESS MOTHERS
HYBRID MODERN
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Read an excerpt here.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
368 pages
6.125 x 9.25
12 illus., 3 tables, 5 genealogical charts, 3 maps, appends., notes, index
Cloth ISBN:  978-0-8078-3368-1
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-7111-9

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Awards & Distinctions

• 2010 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
• 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina‘s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship.

Lowery argues that “Indian” is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of “Indian blood” (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of “black blood” (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities

Table of Contents

• Preface: Telling Our Own Stories
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terms
• Introduction: Coming Together
• 1 ADAPTING TO SEGREGATION
• 2 MAKING HOME AND MAKING LEADERS
• 3 TAKING SIDES
• 4 CONFRONTING THE NEW DEAL
• 5 Pembroke Farms: Gaining Economic Autonomy
• 6 MEASURING IDENTITY
• 7 RECOGNIZING THE LUMBEE
• Conclusion: Creating a Lumbee and Tuscarora Future
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index

Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition

Theory, Culture & Society
Volume 18, Numbers 2-3 (June 2001)
pages 219-245
DOI: 10.1177/026327640101800211

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Take just about any exercise in social mapping and it is the hybrids, those that straddle categories, that are missing. Take most arrangements of multiculturalism and it is the hybrids that are not counted, not accommodated. So what? This article is about the recognition of hybridity, in-betweenness. The first section discusses the varieties of hybridity and the widening range of phenomena to which the term now applies. According to anti-hybridity arguments, hybridity is inauthentic and ‘multiculturalism lite’. Examining these arguments provides an opportunity to deepen and fine-tune our perspective. What is missing in the antihybridity arguments is historical depth; in this treatment the third section deals with the longue durÈeand proposes multiple historical layers of hybridity. The fourth section concerns the politics of boundaries, for in the end the real problem is not hybridity—which is common throughout history—but boundaries and the social proclivity to boundary fetishism. Hybridity is a problem only from the point of view of essentializing boundaries. What hybridity means varies not only over time but also in different cultures and this informs different patterns of hybridity. Then we come back to the original question: so what? The importance of hybridity is that it problematizes boundaries.

Read the entire article here.

Sugar & Slate

Planet Books
January 2002
192 pages
ISBN-10: 0954088107
ISBN-13: 978-0954088101
8.1 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches

Charlotte Williams, Professor of Social Work
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year, 2003

A mixed-race young woman, the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, grows up in a small town on the coast of north Wales. From there she travels to Africa, the Caribbean and finally back to Wales. What begins as a journey becomes a fascinating confrontation with herself and with the idea of Wales and Welshness.

Sugar and Slate is a remarkable personal memoir that speaks to the wider experience of mixed-race Britons, characterised by its constant pull of to-ing and fro-ing, movement and dislocation, going away and coming back with always a sense of being ‘half home’. It is a story of Welshness and a story of Wales but above all a story for those of us who look over our shoulder across the sea to some other place.

The Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children Scale

Journal of Black Psychology
2001
Vol. 27, No. 1
pages 86-99
DOI: 10.1177/0095798401027001005

Charmain F. Jackman
University of Southern Mississippi

William G. Wagner, Professor
University of Southern Mississippi

J. T. Johnson
University of Southern Mississippi

The Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children Scale (AMCS) was developed to measure adults’ attitudes concerning the psychosocial development of multiracial children. Two separate studies were conducted to evaluate the items devised for the scale. In the first study, an initial version of the AMCS was administered to 250 college students from racially/ethnically diverse backgrounds. Results revealed that scores on the 43-item scale were internally consistent (Cronbach’s alpha = .92) and that four factors (i.e., Multiracial Identity, Multiracial Heritage, General Adjustment, and Social Relationships) could be identified. The AMCS was then revised and administered to a group of 187 participants. Again, factor analysis yielded a four-factor solution (i.e., Psychosocial Adjustment, Self-Esteem, Multiracial Identity, and Multiracial Heritage). The internal consistency for scores on the resulting 23-item scale was good (Cronbach’s alpha = .87) and 3-week test-retest reliability (n = 15) was .77.