Mixed Race Studies

The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875-1935

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 23, Number 3 (2002)
pages 29-54
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2003.0009

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

At a lavish wedding and reception in New York City in 1891 Elaine Goodale, daughter of a prominent New England family, married Charles Eastman, a member of the Wahpeton band of the Santee Sioux (Dakotas). Writing in her memoirs Elaine declared, “I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” Charles, a medical doctor, described himself a few months before their marriage by writing, “I was soon to realize my long dream—to become a complete man! I thought of little else than the good we two could do together.” Both Charles and Elaine were members of a group of reformers who sought to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation, and they portrayed their marriage as a natural means to overcome Indian “backwardness” and poverty. The white woman would further uplift her already civilized Dakota husband, and the couple would work diligently to serve his people.

Fifty years later New York socialite Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her Russian émigré husband, the painter Maurice Sterne. Mabel soon became entranced with Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Describing her feelings, Mabel wrote in her memoirs:

I had a strange sense of dislocation, as though I were swinging like a pendulum over the gulf of the canyon, between the two poles of mankind, between Maurice and Tony; and Maurice seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body, with his power unbroken and hard like the carved granite rock, yet older than the Germanic Russian whom the modern world had destroyed.

Mabel and Tony eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1923. In this case Mabel saw herself as a bridge between Tony’s people and her own; she envisioned her marriage not as a vehicle by which to uplift and “serve her husband’s people,” but as a means to save her own race from the destruction wrought by the modern world.

The stories of the Eastmans’ and Luhans’ marriages contain all the necessary ingredients for two “racy” novels but they also provide more than voyeuristic romances. As Peggy Pascoe has written, “For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage.” Both the Eastmans and the Luhans operated at the outer boundaries of American racial norms. Yet, through writing and speaking about their marriages, both couples worked to transform the racial ideologies of their times. Similarly both couples were bound by the gender norms of their respective eras but they also actively reshaped gender and sexual conventions…

…As Pascoe argues, a study of interracial marriage can also yield a greater understanding of the construction of gender norms as well. Just as with the study of race, women’s historians and other feminist theorists have for decades documented the fleeting nature of gender norms and argued that gender is not a fixed set of notions that directly correlates with biological differences between the male and female sex. Many scholars of intermarriage have ignored gender; they have made little distinction between attitudes toward and laws aimed at relationships between white men and nonwhite women and those directed toward unions between white women and nonwhite men.10 But, as a growing number of other historians have shown, American society has had markedly different attitudes toward interracial marriage depending on the gender of the white person involved. In general, interracial relationships between white men of the colonizing, dominant group and nonwhite women of colonized, conquered, and/or enslaved groups have been tolerated. Although laws in many colonies and states forbid interracial marriage between white men and black women, for example, many white slave owners commonly engaged in forced sex, concubinage, and informal relationships with their female slaves without social opprobrium. As we shall see, relationships between white men and Indian women were similarly tolerated within American society. Liaisons between white men and nonwhite women did not violate the hierarchical order that developed between European Americans, African Americans, and American Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism, conquest, and domination.

As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out, however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage. When white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married, they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order, white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law, white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men, therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white…

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Mixed-Bloods, Mestizas, and Pintos: Race, Gender, and Claims to Whiteness in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?

Western American Literature
Volume 36, Number 3 (Fall 2001)
pages 212-231

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Since the 1980s, a growing number of scholars in widely different fields have discredited race as a self-evident category of human social relations. Alongside the work of scientists who have found no genetic or biological basis for racial categorization, critical race theorists have looked to changes in legal definitions of race and citizenship to conclude that race is socially and culturally constructed. Historians have contributed to the field by analyzing the history of Whiteness and the so-called White race. Many groups considered “White” today were once deemed non-White; it was only through renouncing common cause with other stigmatized “races” that certain Americans such as Irish and Jewish immigrants were able to attain White status and privilege. Of course, “choosing” to become White has not been an option for some Americans whose skin color is not light enough to allow them to pass for White. But as George Fredcrickson argues, it is not from color alone that race is constructed. He asserts that “theessential element [in notions of race and racism] is that belief, however justified or rationalized, in the critical importance of differing lines of descent and the use of that belief to establish or validate social inequality”.

The social construction of race played out in myriad spaces: in brightly lit courtrooms and dark bedrooms, in factories and fields, in movie theaters and swimming pools, in classrooms and offices, in fast-moving trains and plodding city buses. The realm of literature as well became a space in which various American sought to envision and enforce their notions of race. The literature of the American West offers a particularly rich bounty of competing constructions of race. Until recently it has been all too common in the fields of both western American literature and western history to study Anglo-Americans’ views of the West and its peoples. A growing number of scholars, however, have challenged the ethnocentrism and cultural hegemony of this approach.

Significantly, though, we are not the first to engage in such a critique of Anglo-Americans’ portrayals of the West. Even as Easterners flooded bookstores and literary journals with their accounts of the West in the nineteenth century, an elite and well-educated Californians, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, penned her own challenge to such representations. In 1872, countering Anglo notions that Californians were a “half barbaric” race who were unfit to govern themselves, to hold property, or to occupy professional positions, Ruiz de Burton published Who Would Have Thought It?, a political satire dressed up as a romance novel. Although written twelve years before one of the most famous Anglo novels about nineteenth-century California, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Ruiz de Burton’s novel nevertheless reads like a sharp retort and a satire of Jackson’s view of California and the West…

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Scales of Whiteness and Racial Mixing: Challenging and Confirming Racial Categories

The Geographical Bulletin
Gamma Theta Upsilon – The International Geographic Honor Socieety
Volume 50-2, November 2009
pages 93-110

Serin D. Houston
Department of Geography
Syracuse University

This paper examines personal and public portrayals of the self and family articulated by heterosexual mixed-race households living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It argues that an attention to scale sheds light on how mixed-race partnerships and households both reproduce a racial hierarchy and express shifting racial identities. A focus on the work of whiteness—defined here as an evaluative set of practices and processes that implicitly or explicitly legitimate a static racial hierarchy—in the confirmation of and challenges to racial categories further specifies my claims. I explore seemingly contradictory expressions of race in an effort to 1) point to the resilience of racism and to 2) indicate moments and spaces wherein racial identities change. Through qualitative interviews and a scalar lens, I aim to contribute to conversations on where and how stalwart assumptions about race emerge and add to considerations of where and how interpretations of race adopt a more contextual and dynamic form. Recognizing both the instances when different racialized landscapes come to the fore and the times when ardent stereotypes surface can help pave the way for re-imagining racial futures.

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In search of the power of whiteness: A genealogical exploration of negotiated racial identities in America’s ethnic past

Communication Quarterly
Volume 50, Issue 3-4 (2002)
pages 391-409
DOI: 10.1080/01463370209385674

Roberto Avant‐Mier, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Texas, El Paso

Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah

In this essay, the authors explore some of the relational, intersectional, and contextual dimensions of negotiated racial identities. By employing a genealogical method of analysis that looks at three key cases (Anastasie Desarzant, Homer Plessy, and Suzie Phipps), they investigate how various historically‐situated communities in Louisiana have dealt with some of the contradictions, multiplicities and tensions of racial and ethnic identity formation. They then apply these insights in an analysis of issues relating to colorblindness versus color consciousness and commentaries on contemporary examples of how negotiated identities might affect various present‐day publics, debates, and politics.

Americans have always had ambivalent feelings regarding the question of what to do about the nation’s racial identities, and this was especially true when citizens had to deal with the ambiguities of the Enlightenment ideals. During the time of the Founders, civic leaders talked about the importance of the notion that “all men [sic] are created equal,” but when these ideals were put into practice, they had to compete with the economic and social hierarchies that were considered to be mirrors of natural inequalities. Given these normative expectations, it should come as no surprise that in 1790, the first Congress voted that a person must be “white” in order to be a citizen (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Omi & Winant, 1994; Roediger, 1994). Since that time, the very notion of what it means to have either a “racial” or an “ethnic” identity has gotten even more complicated, as layers of legal, political, and cultural meanings have pulled us in the competing directions of defending either color con-…

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Racial Queer: Multiracial College Students at the Intersection of Identity, Education and Agency

University of Texas, Austin
May 2010
495 pages

Aurora Chang-Ross

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas a Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin

Racial Queer is a qualitative study of Multiracial college students with a critical ethnographic component. The design methods, grounded in Critical Race Methodology and Feminist Thought (both theories that inform Critical Ethnography), include: 1) 25 semi-structured interviews of Multiracial students, 2) of which 5 were expanded into case studies, 3) 3 focus groups, 4) observations of the sole registered student organization for Multiracial students on Central University’s campus, 5) field notes and 6) document analysis. The dissertation examines the following question: How do Multiracial students understand and experience their racialized identities within a large, public, tier-one research university in Texas? In addition, it addresses the following sub-questions: How do Multiracial students experience their racialized identities in their everyday interactions with others, in relation to their own self-perceptions and in response to the way others perceive them to be? How do Multiracial students’ positionalities, as they relate to power, privilege, phenotype and status, guide their behavior in different contexts and situations?

Using Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of self and identity, Chicana Feminist Theory, and tenets of Queer Theory, this study illustrates how Multiracial college students utilize agency as racial queers to construct and negotiate their identities within a context where identity is both self-constructed and produced for them. I introduce the term, racial queer, to frame the unconventional space of the Multiracial individual. I use this term not to convey sexuality, but to convey the parallels of queerness (both as a term of empowerment and derogation) as they pertain to being Multiracial. In other words, queerness denotes a unique individuality as well as a deviation from the norm (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1993; Gamson, 2000).

The primary purpose of this study is to illustrate the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Preliminary findings suggest the need to expand the scope of racial discourses to include Multiracial experiences and for further study of Multiracial students. Their counter-narratives access an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Introduction
  • An Autobiographical Preface
  • Overview of Study
  • Research Question
  • Importance of the Topic
  • Outline of Study
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Introduction
  • Critical Race Theory and the Social Construction/Lived Experience of Race
  • The Multiracial Population – The Census: “Check One or More”
  • Historical Origins of Multiraciality in the United States.
  • Multiracials as Underrepresented Group – One Step Forward or Backward?
  • Racial Identity Development Theories and Models – An Overview
  • Multiracial College Students
  • Student Development Theory & Campus Climate
  • Education and Multiracial Students
  • Conceptual Framework
    • Introduction
    • Social Practice Theory of Self and Identity
    • Chicana Feminist Theory
    • Tenets of Queer Theory
    • Racial Queer
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Reflections of a Multiracial Researcher
  • Genealogy of Methodology
  • Research Overview
  • Why Qualitative Research?
  • Setting
  • Participants
  • Selection Criteria
  • Counter Storytelling
  • Methods Rooted in Feminist Thought
  • Observations
  • Field Notes
  • Interviews
  • Case Studies
  • Focus Groups
  • Data Management and Analysis
  • Researcher’s Positionality
  • Making Sense of Methods
• Chapter Four: Portraits of Racial Queers
  • Introduction to Participant Narratives
  • Participant Narratives
    • Dee-Dee
    • Solomon
    • May
    • Jonathan
    • Melissa
    • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Themes – Understanding and Experiencing Multiracial
  • Identity
  • Introduction
  • Racial Rubric – “I don’t have a racial rubric to follow.”
  • Racial Disclosure – “I couldn’t be passive about it. And I just told this girl, No! I am Hispanic!”
  • Identity Fusion – “There’s little way of being able to separate all of those identities out.”
  • Multiracial Entitlement–“ I felt more entitled to the [Multiracial] label.”
  • Development of Portraits/Narratives
  • Discussion
  • Agency
  • Culturally Responsive Teaching and Hidden Curriculum
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Six: Multiracial Students in the Daily Practice of Schooling
  • Introduction
  • Learning the meaning of race at school
  • General Findings
    • Identity
    • Findings Specific to Multiracial Identity
    • The Politics of racial identification terminology
    • Negotiating and Strategizing – Racial Identity and Relationships
    • Phenotype Matters
    • Collective Experiences – Multiracials as Community
    • Skills, Intuition and Perspective – Lessons in Constructing Multiracial Identity
    • Implications and Significance
    • Expansion of Racial Discourses-Challenging Racial
    • Inclusivity
    • Rethinking and Reevaluating of Educational Public Policies
  • Final Thoughts
  • Reflections of a Native Researcher
  • Recommendations for Future Research
  • Lessons Learned
• Appendix
  • -A Brief Genealogy
  • -Email to Participants
  • -Interview Questions and Prompts
  • -Informed Consent to Participate In Research
• References
• Vita

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AAS 310: Constructing and Negotiating Multiracial Identity

University of Texas, Austin
Center for Asian American Studies
Fall 2008

This course serves as an introduction to the experiences of biracial and multiracial people, specifically with a focus on “mixed”/hapa Asian American, African American and Latino people in the U.S., concentrating on theories of race, racial identity formation, culture, media, and social justice struggles. As such, it presents the major themes and issues in a new and growing interdisciplinary field of scholarly research and cultural production.

Throughout the semester, the goal is to foster a classroom environment which will become a community space in which the beliefs and attitudes of all participants are respectfully considered.

For more information, click here.

The mulatta text and the muted voice in “Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon”: Revising the genre of the slave narrative

Marquette University
August 1995
202 pages

Rebecca Anne Ferguson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

From the earliest critical discussion of the slave narrative genre in Rev. Ephraim Peabody’s review essay of 1849 through the most recent scholarly analyses, unexamined assumptions have been advanced about the conventions, including structure, language, theme, and plot, which determine the inclusion of those slave narratives identified as generic texts. The 1988 publication of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., includes several formerly unavailable slave narratives which constitute a new subgenre I am here defining for the first time as “mulatta texts.” Mulatta texts expose, in their structuring between unequal voices, the negotiations necessary in slavery, an institution defined as the “paradox of formal distance and physical intimacy” by historian C. Vann Woodward. I analyze the textual control and moral agenda that the named author, northern abolitionist Rev. Hiram Mattison, maintained over one exemplary mulatta text in the Schomburg Library, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, but I also attend carefully to the complex and “muted voice” (to borrow John Sekora’s term) of Louisa Picquet as she advances very different purposes. Determined to gain the financial contributions necessary to purchase the freedom of her mother and brother, Picquet cooperates with her interrogator even as she resists his familiar gaze and asserts her identity as a black woman in her own community. Although the last half of the text seems to erase Picquet, careful analyses of Louisa Picquet and other mulatta texts supports Toni Morrison’s project, as limned in Playing in the Dark, to re-examine the entire canon of American literature for the presences of “Africanisms.” Expanded understandings of the complexities of voice in mulatta narratives will allow us to respond to the voices of former slaves in other mulatta texts, narratives neither written nor controlled by the African Americans but nonetheless shaped by their powers of articulation and resistance.

Table of Contents

• I. A “Paradox of Formal Distance and Physical Intimacy”: Generic Criticism and the Mixed Nature of the Slave Narratives
• II. No Longer at the Margin: Mulatta Texts in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
• III. Assessing the Participation of Rev. Hiram Mattison in the Mulatta Text, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon
• IV. “Multiple Forms of Resistance”: A Narrative of Louisa Picquet’s Voice
• V. The Competing Narrative Strategies in the Mulatta Text of Louisa Picquet
• Endnotes

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Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (Electronic Edition)

Published by the Author
1861
60 pages

Hiram Mattison, A.M. (1811-1868), Pastor
Union Chapel, New York

Read the entire novel here.

Developing: Supreme Court vacates Freedmen ruling

Cherokee Phoenix
2011-08-23

Christina Good Voice, Senior Reporter

Tahlequah, Okla. – The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court issued a 16-page ruling Aug. 22 that reversed and vacated the decision of the CN District Court regarding the Cherokee Freedmen, stating that the Cherokee people had the right to amend the CN constitution and set citizenship requirements.

Acting Principal Chief Joe Crittenden addressed the ruling at the Aug. 22 council meeting in his State of the Nation.

“All of us, the council, the staff and myself got copies (of the ruling,)” he said. “I’m going to defer to our attorney general for some comments concerning this. I know there are a lot of questions on people’s minds.”

Hammons said the ruling, which was filed at 5 p.m. Monday evening, reverses the decision of the District Court…

…The court also found that the Treaty of 1866 only granted to Freedmen the rights of native Cherokees but that it was the constitution of the Cherokee people that granted them citizenship, she said.

“The freedmen at the time gained citizenship status in the Cherokee Nation by the Cherokee people’s sovereign expression in the 1866 constitutional amendment to the 1839 Cherokee Nation constitution,” according to the ruling. “It stands to reason that if the Cherokee People had the right to define the Cherokee Nation citizenship in the above mentioned 1866 Constitutional Amendment they would have the sovereign right to change the definition of the Cherokee Nation citizenship in their sovereign expression in the March 3, 2007 Constitutional Amendment.”…

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Into the box and out of the picture: The rhetorical management of the mulatto in the Jim Crow era

Duke University
2005
573 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3250085

Jené Lee Schoenfeld

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

Contemporary conventional wisdom maintains that anyone who has any trace of black ancestry is black. This precept, known as the “one drop rule,” was not always so widely accepted; in fact, from 1850 to 1920 an intermediate racial category—mulatto—appeared on the United States Census. Visibly “both/and” in a society of “either/or,” the ambiguous body of the mulatto had the potential to obscure the color line and thus the system of racial hierarchy predicated on the division it marks. Therefore, the limited tolerance under slavery of an intermediate racial status became untenable during Jim Crow. In my dissertation, I argue that the fiction of the Jim Crow era helped the one drop rule gain hegemonic status.

Through sustained close readings of texts by Frances Harper, Thomas Dixon, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, I argue that the biological determinism of the one drop rule is inadequate to explain what makes their characters—who are often physically, culturally, and even socially aligned with whiteness—”truly” black and suggest that in mulatto fiction, self-identification emerges as the fundamental basis of racial identity. I argue that fiction facilitated the containment of racial indeterminacy by “rhetorically managing” the mulatto into choosing blackness for herself through characterizations of those who remained racially liminal as tragically marginal and generally despicable, and contrasting characterizations of those who chose to identify as black as noble, privileged, and supported by the embrace of their families and their communities. The possibility of choosing one’s racial identification, however, undermines racial ideology’s essentialist pretense to racial authenticity. Therefore, choice must be supplemented by demonstrations of racial allegiance, such as “intraracial” marriage, which preserves at least the illusion of biological and cultural racial continuity, and seamless performances, of blackness or whiteness. Finally, I examine the relative authority—asymmetrical because of the construction of whiteness as pure and exclusive—of self-identification with respect to whiteness and blackness, and the near impossibility of self-identification outside this binary.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• 1. “What are you?” And why it matters
• 2. “Genocidal Images” or “Imagined Community”: Converting the Marginal Mulatto into a Light-Skinned Elite Black
• 3. Keeping Race in the Family: Marriage as Racial Pledge of Allegiance
• 4. Indeterminacy on the Loose! Invisible Blackness and the Permeability of the Color Line
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Biography

Introduction

The mulatto figure in American fiction is too often treated by critics as though she is static, both within individual texts and over the course of American literary history. Critics tend to assume that the most famous version of the mulatto figure—the antebellum tragic mulatto, whose near-whiteness was used to evoke white readers’ sympathy for the abolitionist cause is the only significant template for the mulatto figure. Moreover, they take for granted the mulatto’s essential blackness, explaining away her apparent whiteness as solely a concession to white racism. My dissertation models an approach to the mulatto figure that is attentive to the figure’s development.

On the scale of American literary history, I argue that the representation of the mulatto is inextricably bound up with the (United States’) political context. Though I am also interested in the way that racial indeterminacy is represented in contemporary texts, in what I think of as the post-mulatto moment, I decided quite early on that this was better saved for a future project. I focus instead on representations of the mulatto during the Jim Crow era and how those representations differ from antebellum representations of the mulatto. At its heart, this project is fundamentally a literary one, but as I sought to explain why the mulatto was represented differently in the Jim Crow era, I became interested in the relationship between those representations and a broader social and political context.

Accordingly, I offer an interdisciplinary hypothesis that literature concerning the mulatto—what I call “mulatto fiction”—was instrumental in facilitating an historical shift in the racial structure of the United States from an antebellum racial system with some possibility of a third racial category (labeled “mulatto”) to a system that is much more rigidly a binary of black and white. The effect of this historical shift was that the mulatto “became” black. While I believe that this may be true, I want to qualify this as a provisional claim. I can and do offer (mostly in chapter one) concrete evidence that such a historical shift occurred. For example, “mulatto” appeared as a category on the United States’ census from 1850 to 1920, but from 1930 onward, mulattoes were moved into the box marked “Negro,” and thus rendered invisible as mulattoes. It is to this shift that my title, “Into the Box and Out of the Picture,” refers. To establish the causal relationship between mulatto fiction and the historical shift that I describe, at this stage I can only offer a theory about why other, more obvious, forms of racial discipline, such as the law, might have had limited power to control the mulatto’s racial identification.

I would also qualify my related claim that mulatto fiction is invested in facilitating the development of the binary racial system through the disappearance of the mulatto. Additional research into authorial biography would allow me to make that claim more forcefully, however, I stand by that claim as a description of a trend in fiction of the early Jim Crow era (in the years shortly after Reconstruction). Some of the most interesting works of mulatto fiction—those by Faulkner and Larsen, for example—are critical of the binary racial schema. Those texts, however, tend to appear later in the Jim Crow era, when the binary is already well-established. Even in those texts, as I argue at length in the body of my dissertation, the critiques are limited by the existing terms of the discourse. In Quicksand, for example, Larsen locates the “problem” of the mulatto in the system—not in her mulatto protagonist, Helga—yet she cannot imagine any positive resolution to the situation. Though Helga eventually marries a black man and settles in the most apparently “authentic” black setting—among the folk of the rural South—almost as soon as she arrives, Helga is (as usual) looking for a way out. Despite Larsen’s critique of the racial system that so confines Helga, there is no way out for her. As in earlier works of mulatto fiction, Helga must fully embrace a black racial identity or die.

Another way in which my dissertation seeks to broaden the context in which we interpret the mulatto figure is by expanding the scope of the texts we might include. I argue for the consideration of what I call “mulatto discourse,” which, in addition to literary texts, includes representations of the mulatto in such fields as law and (pseudo)science. The mulatto, especially in the Jim Crow era, is a site of contestation over the establishment and location of the color line. That is to say, the mulatto figures centrally in arguments about where whiteness (along with “legitimate” access to white privilege) ends and blackness begins. Indeed, this is a question explored in the literature I discuss, but it is a battle fought in other contexts as well. Regarding the literature, I argue that authors on both sides of the color line, and from both racist and antiracist perspectives, are invested in the racial identification of the mulatto figure. The motivation behind such an investment differs; racists, obviously, are interested in supporting racial hierarchy, whereas antiracists may hope that a strategic cssentialism will create a richer base from which to mount challenges to that hierarchy. Similarly, racists and antiracists represent the mulatto differently with respect to the question of racial identity. Racists tend to emphasize the mulatto’s degeneracy, thereby suggesting that the mulatto should not exist. Antiracists tend to push the mulatto away from racial liminality by representing the tragically marginal mulatto negatively, while drawing the mulatto into blackness by representing the “light-skinned” member of the black elite positively. Despite these variations, these approaches are part of a common discourse. What all of the fictional texts under analysis in my dissertation have in common is an interest in the possibilities (in some cases, even the necessity) and the limits of self- identification for the mulatto.

Self-identification is particularly important in mulatto discourse because of the difficulty of using the external evidence of the mulatto’s phenotype to assign the mulatto a racial classification in accord with the rules established by racial ideology, in particular, the one drop rule, which dictates that anyone with a trace of black ancestry is to be considered as unequivocally black. My work focuses on the mulatto figure, exemplified by Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, whose phenotype suggests a white racial identity; the most “problematic” figure from the perspective of those invested in racial hierarchy. (I deliberately do not say “who could pass for white,” because then I, too, would be assuming the mulatto’s essential blackness, which I do not.) This mulatto’s apparent whiteness often contradicts her legal status as a black. (I say “often” because in some cases the mulatto is not legally black.) Racial ideology developed and deployed a set of narratives in various fields to support its insistence on the mulatto’s essential blackness despite the potentially contradictory “evidence” of phenotype, legal status, or even social acceptance in white communities. Though some texts in mulatto discourse frame their exploration of the contradiction embodied by the mulatto as a critique of the “logic” of racial ideology, the driving force of mulatto discourse during the Jim Crow era seems to be an impulse toward containment of racial ambiguity.

The ramifications for Jim Crow of the problem of the mulatto’s ambiguous body were both practical and ideological. The mulatto presented a practical problem for segregation because she could move out of the places designated for her without being detected. In other words, she could access white privilege without (according to racial ideology) being legitimately entitled to it. Furthermore, the mulatto—whose body is a concrete reminder of intimate relationships between blacks and whites—presented an ideological problem for segregation, a form of racial hierarchy that sought to institute maximum distance between the races.

Because the mulatto’s blackness does not register visually, I argue that agency assumes a greater role in the mulatto’s racial identification than it otherwise might. Racism is implicated in the stakes of how the mulatto identifies racially, but because she is not visually identifiable as black, she may not be personally subjected to racism unless she identifies as black and publicly expresses this identification. For example, in Iola Leroy, set shortly after the Civil War, Iola takes a job in a Northern white establishment as salesperson. She informs the manager that she is “colored,” and he hires her, but cautions her not to tell her fellow employees. Iola does promise this, but she does not go out of her way to broadcast her racial identification either. Then one day, a coworker is where I go.” Confused by her own reluctance to make the connection between Iola’s church attendance and her racial identification—thereby admitting that she has been working with a “colored” woman without knowing it—the other salesperson asks why Iola attends a colored church. Iola finally makes her meaning plain: “Because I wished to be with my own people” Comprehending at last, the (presumably “legitimately”) white salesperson “looked surprised and pained, and almost instinctively moved a little farther from her.” By the end of the day, the entire staff knows about Iola’s racial identification and they insist that Iola be fired, which she is. This is a very clear example of the way in which agency plays a unique role in the apparently white mulatto’s racial identification and attendant experience (or lack thereof) of racism. If she had been characterized by more obvious phenotypic cues suggesting blackness, Iola would probably never have been hired, not even by the manager inclined to give a colored girl a chance. Yet if Iola had simply lied about her church (and other personal details that may have come up), the salespeople and their customers would have continued to assume that she was “legitimately” white, and she would not have been fired…

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