Mixed Race Studies

Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks and Future Americans

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 15, Number 3, Discovery: Research and Interpretation (Autumn, 1988)
pages 109-119

SallyAnn H. Ferguson, Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Scholarship on novelist and short story writer Charles W. Chesnutt stagnates in recent years because his critics have failed to address substantively the controversial issues raised by his essays. Indeed, many scholars either minimize or ignore the fact that these writings complement his fiction and, more importantly, that they often reveal unflattering aspects of Chesnutt the social reformer and artist. In a much-quoted journal entry of 16 March 1880, Chesnutt himself explicitly links his literary art with social reform, saying he would write for a “high, holy purpose,” “not so much [for] the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites/’ Using the most sophisticated artistic skills at his command, he ultimately hopes to expose the latter to a variety of positive and non-stereotypic images of the “colored people” and thereby mitigate white racism. As he remarks in a 29 May 1880 entry, “it is the province of literature to open the way for him [the colored person] to get it [equality]—to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them [whites], to lead people out, imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step, to the desired state of feeling.” Throughout his entire literary career, Chesnutt never strays far from these basic reasons for writing, in fiction and nonfiction alike.

It is in his essays, however, that Chesnutt most clearly reveals the limited nature of his social and literary goals. Armed with such familiar journal passages as those cited above, scholars have incorrectly presumed that this writer seeks to use literature primarily as a means for alleviating white color prejudice against all black people in this country. But, while the critics romantically hail him as a black artist championing the cause of his people, Chesnutt, as his essays show, is essentially a social and literary accommodationist who pointedly and repeatedly confines his reformist impulses to the “colored people”—a term that he almost always applies either to color-line blacks or those of mixed races. This self-imposed limitation probably stems from the fact that he wrote during a time of intense color hatred in America,…

The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency

Texas A&M University Press
2014-01-15
266 pages
6 x 9
7 b&w photos. 4 figs. 4 tables. Bib. Index.
Unjacketed Cloth ISBN: 978-1-62349-042-3
Paper ISBN: 978-1-62349-043-0

Edited by:

Justin S. Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Boise State University

Jennifer R. Mercieca, Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Texas A&M University

Campaign rhetoric helps candidates to get elected, but its effects last well beyond the counting of the ballots; this was perhaps never truer than in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Did Obama create such high expectations that they actually hindered his ability to enact his agenda? Should we judge his performance by the scale of the expectations his rhetoric generated, or against some other standard? The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency grapples with these and other important questions.

Barack Obama’s election seemed to many to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “long arc of the moral universe . . . bending toward justice.” And after the terrorism, war, and economic downturn of the previous decade, candidate Obama’s rhetoric cast broad visions of a change in the direction of American life. In these and other ways, the election of 2008 presented an especially strong example of creating expectations that would shape the public’s views of the incoming administration.  The public’s high expectations, in turn, become a part of any president’s burden upon assuming office.

The interdisciplinary scholars who have contributed to this volume focus their analysis upon three kinds of presidential burdens: institutional burdens (specific to the office of the presidency); contextual burdens (specific to the historical moment within which the president assumes office); and personal burdens (specific to the individual who becomes president).

MXRS Podcast Episode 1: Lawrence-Minh Búi Davis and the Mixed Race Initiative

Mixed Roots Stories
2013-12-10

Chandra Crudup, Host

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Host

Mark R. Edwards, Host

Lawrence-Minh Búi Davis, co-Editor-in-Chief
Asian American Literary Review

We are thrilled to launch Episode 1 of the MXRS Podcast – bringing you the story behind the stories. Our first several episodes are in partnership with the Asian American Literary Review and its Mixed Race Initiative. Editor-in-Chief Lawrence-Minh Búi Davis is our first guest. Join us as our conversation winds its way through language, how we identify ourselves, the origins of the Mixed Race Initiative and its components, making our work more accessible, and much more.

Listen to the interview here (00:30:17). Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

New York Times and The American Riddle

Only-NeverInSweden
2013-09-03

Larry Lundgren
Linköping, Sweden

The [New York] Times accepted two comments on OpEd article by Charles Blow: “The Most Dangerous Negro.”

Here are the two books that I presently cite in comments on this and related articles

Prewitt, Kenneth, 2013, What is Your Race-The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans: Princeton University Press, Princeton

Roberts, Dorothy, 2011, Fatal Invention-How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century: The New Press, London

These are the two most important books on this subject that I have read. They should be read by every American professor who daily employs the nomenclature of the US Census Bureau classification of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Witnessing Charles Chesnutt: The Contexts of “The Dumb Witness”

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 103-121
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt045

Benjamin S. Lawson
Florida State University

The silence and silencing of the character Viney in Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Dumb Witness” (c. 1897), artfully addresses the issue of exploitation related to race, gender, and slavery. Viney has no voice, no speaking, and no say-so; however, she employs this voicelessness for her own subversive ends. The story’s technique of embedded narratives problematizes issues of identity and consequent uses of power. Who is exploiting whom? Chesnutt’s narrator is a sympathetic white outsider who gains knowledge of the rural South by quizzing a slave, Uncle Julius. Yet Uncle Julius solidifies his own status by being a story-telling virtuoso who knows and narrates the tale of the mixed-race Viney and her cruel master. The suggestiveness of this theme expands beyond the story’s borders, for scholars have posited that Chesnutt himself was a black voice censored and exploited by his white publisher. Or was Chesnutt actually using his publisher to promote his own reputation? Decades later, African American studies appropriated Chesnutt as a primarily black rather than Southern writer. Mainstream and African American academic institutions and publishers promote him variously to express their own perspectives. We as readers continue to dictate the parameters of his realities—to manipulate his voice—as we use him for our own academic and political purposes. We forget that Chesnutt himself was immensely complex and conflicted as an Ohio-born and mostly-white man. Just as we witness Charles Chesnutt, he witnesses us: he interrogates our motives.

Read or purchase the article here.

Creating Multiracial Identities in the Work of Rebecca Walker and Kip Fulbeck: A Collective Critique of American Liberal Multiculturalism

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 171-190
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt053

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Americans of multiracial descent recently have become noticeable, respectable, marketable, and, in the case of Barack Obama, presidential. In the last two decades, a growing body of creative and critical work about multiracial lives and issues has materialized. This social and historical development has become an ideological battleground for advocates, politicians, scholars, journalists, and marketers who have appropriated and interpreted its products and personalities in relation to their own beliefs, objectives, and commitments. According to many popular and political accounts, the growing number of interracial marriages and self-identified multiracials indicates that American society quickly is becoming post-racial. Scholars of this development, however, have been mostly skeptical of accounts that claim or assume that race-mixing leads to post-racial societies. Among scholars, there is ongoing debate over the precise impact that the emergent self-identified multiracial population is having on race, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy. Many scholars agree with G. Reginald Daniel, who claims that self-identified multiracials challenge race and racial hierarchy. However, Rainier Spencer and others argue the opposite: self-identified multiracials maintain racial hierarchy and reproduce race insofar as they rely on established racial categories to articulate their experiences and identities. Hence, this debate is at an impasse.

One way to negotiate this impasse is to shift the focus of the debate from the impact that self-identified multiracials have had on race and racial hierarchy to the conditions that have made mixed-race individuals possible in ethno-racial combinations besides black and white. Of course, scholars who analyze this development through a black/white framework will likely object to this move on the grounds that all other ethno-racial categories must fall between black and white in the racial hierarchy, thus orienting multiracial identities, old and new, toward whiteness and away from blackness. Their objection, however, presumes stable racial categories, groups, and ways…

Read or purchase the article here.

Arabs, Hispanics seeking better US Census recognition

Aljazeera America
2013-12-17

Haya El Nasser, Los Angeles Digital Reporter

 Many community organizations hope for a new Middle East and North Africa category in the next Census.

When Hassan Jaber, a Lebanese-American, fills out his Census questionnaire, the race question gives him pause. White? No. Black? No. Asian? American Indian? Native Hawaiian? No, no, no.

So he checks off the only other option: “some other race.”

“The categories really don’t represent us,” said Jaber, executive director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Dearborn, Mich. “Even putting it under ‘other’ makes the reliability of the information very questionable.”

But all this could soon change.

In the face of an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic population that no longer fits neatly into traditional classifications set by the government, the Census Bureau has been testing major changes in how it asks people to identify their race and ethnicity.

Hispanic, an ethnicity, not a race, may soon be lumped into a broader “race and origin” category, effectively treating it as a race for the first time.

The line between race and ethnicity has become artificial, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the author of an upcoming book on the nation’s diversity. “What’s the definition of race? It’s not nationality. It’s not skin color, necessarily,” he said. “It’s sort of a mishmash.”

Last summer, the Arab American Institute sent a letter signed by 30 advocacy groups asking the Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which sets race standards, to create a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) category.

Nicholas Jones, chief of the Census racial-statistics branch, calls the letter “historic.”

Several populations are clamoring for their own categories, but, Jones said, “it’s the only group we’ve received a letter from requesting a separate ethnicity box.”…

Read the entire article here.

Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool

Liverpool University Press
March 2014
288 pages
16 black and white illustrations, 1 colour illustrations, 1 maps
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846319679
Paperback ISBN: 9781781380000

John Belchem, Emeritus Professor of History
University of Liverpool

Long before the arrival of the ‘Empire Windrush’ after the Second World War, Liverpool was widely known for its polyglot population, its boisterous ‘sailortown’ and cosmopolitan profile of transients, sojourners and settlers. Regarding Britain as the mother country, ‘coloured’ colonials arrived in Liverpool for what they thought to be internal migration into a common British world. What they encountered, however, was very different. Their legal status as British subjects notwithstanding, ‘coloured’ colonials in Liverpool were the first to discover: ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’.

Despite the absence of significant new immigration, despite the high levels of mixed dating, marriages and parentage, and despite pioneer initiatives in race and community relations, black Liverpudlians encountered racial discrimination, were left marginalized and disadvantaged and, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981, the once proud ‘cosmopolitan’ Liverpool stood condemned for its ‘uniquely horrific’ racism.

‘Before the Windrush’ is a fascinating study that enriches our understanding of how the empire ‘came home’. By drawing attention to Liverpool’s mixed population in the first half of the twentieth century and its approach to race relations, this book seeks to provide historical context and perspective to debates about Britain’s experience of empire in the twentieth century.

Contents

• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: ‘The most disturbing case of racial disadvantage in the United Kingdom’
• 1. Edwardian cosmopolitanism
• 2. Riot, miscegenation and inter-war depression
• 3. War-time hospitality and the colour bar
• 4. Repatriation, reconstruction and post-war race relations
• 5. Race relations in the 1950s
• 6. 1960s: race and youth
• 7. The failure of community relations
• 8. ‘It took a riot’
• Sources consulted
• Index

Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature

Duke University Press
January 2014
176 pages
3 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5595-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5581-6

Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English; Professor of Law; Professor of Women’s Studies
Duke University

In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law’s constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen’s Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Bound by Law
  • Intimate Intersectionalities—Scalar Reflections
  • Public Fictions, Private Facts
  • Simile as Precedent
  • Property, Contract, and Evidentiary Values
• 1. The Claims of Property: On Being and Belonging
  • The Capital in Question
  • Imagined Liberalism
  • Mapping Racial Reason
  • Being in Place: Landscape, Never Inscape
• 2. Bodies as Evidence (of Things Not Seen)
  • Secondhand Tales and Hearsay
  • Black Legibility—Can I Get a Witness?
  • Trying to Read Me
• 3. Composing Contract
  • “A novel-like tenor”
  • Passing and Protection
  • A Secluded Colored Neighborhood
• Epilogue. When and Where “All the Dark-Glass Boys” Enter
• A Contagion of Madness
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 20, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 51-60
DOI: 10.1177/1077800413508532

Benny LeMaster
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one “side” of the family over another, I experiment with a concurrent telling. That is, multivocality in one body. To help anchor the telling, I use the academy as an assemblage of meaning. In the end, I find that my White family resists and rejects my queer masculinity because of my pursuit of higher education while my Asian family embraces my queer masculinity because of the same pursuit. These stories can only be known when told and processed concurrently; never alone, and never separate.

Read or purchase the article here.