Mixed Race Studies

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

University of California Press
November 2003
332 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520240704

David R. Roediger, Babcock Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

David R. Roediger’s powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a “still white” nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book—Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani—insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context. Roediger illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. He shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that “nonwhite” alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo.

Colored White reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race—especially its links to social and economic inequality. This landmark work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible—though far from inevitable—that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Roediger’s clear, lively prose and his extraordinary command of the literature make this one of the most original and generative contributions to the study of race and ethnicity in the United States in many decades.

Table of Contents

• One: Still White
  • 1. All about Eve, Critical White Studies, and Getting Over Whiteness
  • 2. Smear Campaign: Giuliani, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the Critical Study of Whiteness
  • 3. White Looks and Limbaugh’s Laugh
  • 4. White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action
  • 5. “Hertz, Don’t It?” White “Colorblindness” and the Mark(et)ings of O.J. Simpson (with Leola Johnson)
• Two: Toward Nonwhite Histories
  • 6. Nonwhite Radicalism: Du Bois, John Brown, and Black Resistance
  • 7. White Slavery, Abolition, and Coalition: Languages of Race, Class, and Gender
  • 8. The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790–1860
  • 9. Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the “New-Immigrant” Working Class (with James Barrett)
  • 10. Plotting against Eurocentrism: The 1929 Surrealist Map of the World
• Three: The Past/Presence of Nonwhiteness
  • 11. What If Labor Were Not White and Male?
  • 12. Mumia Time or Sweeney Time?
  • 13. In Conclusion: Elvis, Wiggers, and Crossing Over to Nonwhiteness
• Notes
• Credits
• Index

The Hudson River School via Cincinnati

Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit
Kingston, New York
2011-05-28

Sparrow

“History can be blind,” observes Joseph D. Ketner II, curator of “Robert S. Duncanson: ‘the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons,’” an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill. Duncanson (1821-1872) was an African-American landscape painter, once highly regarded, now almost entirely forgotten.
 
Born a freedman in Seneca County, New York, Robert Duncanson moved as a youth to Michigan. At the age of 16 he apprenticed to a house painter, then briefly began his own painting and glazing business. In 1840, Duncanson resolved to become an artist, relocating to Cincinnati, the largest city in “the West.” The youth taught himself to paint by copying Thomas Cole paintings and sketching from life. He became an itinerant portraitist, then moved on to nature scenes.
 
By the 1850s in Cincinnati, the two most popular art forms, landscape painting and daguerreotype photography, were dominated by African-American artists. James P. Ball was the preeminent daguerreotypist, Duncanson the top painter. Both men were light-skinned “mulattos,” of mixed race, benefiting from the racial caste system of the time. Cincinnati was a northern city, in a “free state” (one without slavery) whose economy and social outlook were Southern. “Cincinnati was one of the most vociferous abolitionist cities, behind Boston, and it was also one of the most adamant pro-slavery cities, simultaneously—a very, very complex dynamic,” explains Ketner.

In 1855, Duncanson and Ball painted a 600-yard antislavery panorama entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.” This work consisted of a canvas wrapped around two large dowels, which would be unspooled in an auditorium to the accompaniment of an orchestra, with lighting effects and a narrator describing the changing scenes. The “Mammoth Pictorial Tour” traveled the country, advertised as “Painted by Negroes.” Sadly, it is no longer extant…

…It is tempting to interpret Duncanson’s landscapes politically. Those dreamy temples on the shores of rivers—are they images of a utopian world without slavery and racism? Or does that oversimplify them? Duncanson himself once told his son, on the issue of race, “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”…

Read the entire article here.

Psychoanalysis and Interraciality: Asking Different Questions

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Volume 12, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 205–225
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100121

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Adjunct Research Fellow
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

In this article, the author questions psychoanalytic responses to interracial relationships and subjectivity. She argues that much psychoanalytic discussion on interraciality has been shaped by denial and repression of race, fears of miscegenation, and normative assumptions about the superiority of endogamy. From the perspective of hybridity studies and analytic frameworks predicated on the primacy of relationality, it is time to ask different psychoanalytic questions.

Introduction

In recent years there has been a marked increase in discussion about race, racism, and racialized subjectivity in psychoanalytic literature. One area of “race relations” which requires more attention, however, and a different kind of attention from that which it usually receives, is the area of interracial intimacy. In this article, I raise some questions about psychoanalytic responses to interracial sexual intimacy and interracial subjectivity. I argue that historical psychoanalytic responses to interracial desire, intimacy, and subjectivity were shaped by denial and repression of race, and by (unconscious) fears of miscegenation. In addition, I argue that psychoanalytic writers, past or present, who overtly or implicitly pathologize interracial desire deny full subjectivity to those in interracial relationships and of interracial parentage, inadvertently perpetuate forms of racial segregation, and mandate endogamy as the proper choice of “healthy” individuals. When informed by the insights of hybridity/critical mixed race studies and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks embedded in notions of relationality and intersubjectivity, however, psychoanalytic perspectives can provide important insight into the intersubjective complexities, subtleties, and specificities of interracial desire and intimacy.

The article begins with some background information and discussion on general historical attitudes toward miscegenation, and the relatively recent emergence of hybridity/mixed race studies. I then show how “anti-miscegenism” permeates psychoanalysis, first by looking at the historical picture and the implications of covert racist and colonialist formulations for interracial couples and individuals, and then by examining some contemporary psychoanalytic writing on white desire for black bodies. In order to illustrate and elaborate some key issues, I utilize extracts from my research interviews with women and men who are or have been in intimate interracial relationships.

The interviews I draw on for this article are part of a wider psycho-social research project on transculturation in intimate African and non-African relationships, involving a series of conversations with 20 African and non-African women and men over a period of 2 years. There were several dominant themes in the narratives of my interlocutors, one of which was the responses of family, friends, and observers to their “mixed race” marriages, relationships, and children. I decided in the early stages of the research that I would try to let the data direct theoretical exploration, and this article is one outcome of this process (see also Stopford, 2004, 2006a, 2006b)…

Read the entire article here.

Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada [Review]

Quill and Quire – Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews
October 2001

Hugh Hodges, Associate Professor of English
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario

Lawrence Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, Harper Collins Canada, September 2001, 256 pages, Paperback ISBN: 9780006385080; ISBN10: 0006385087.

With Black Berry, Sweet Juice Lawrence Hill opens an overdue discussion of what racial identity means to Canadians of mixed race. It’s a worthwhile project, but Hill undermines his intentions by trying to address academics and casual readers at the same time. The book falls somewhere between memoir and sociological study, but achieves neither the warmth of the former nor the rigour of the latter.

Hill’s reflections on race are often inconsistent. He pays lip service to the idea that cultures and communities are open-ended, but tends to speak of them as if they were homogenous and closed. He also seems to change his mind several times about whether racial identity is chosen by an individual or something they are born with. He argues that in contemporary Canada people are free to self-identify, but suggests that the person of mixed heritage who chooses not to identify himself as black will find that “his own race [will] take a bite out of his backside.”…

Read the entire review here.

The Loving Story

Silverdocs Documentary Festival (2011-06-20 through 2011-06-26)
Silver Spring, Maryland

Augusta Films, LLC
2011
77 minutes
Thursday, 2011-06-23, 14:45 EDT (Local Time)
Friday, 2011-06-24, 19:30 EDT (Local Time)
Official Website: www.lovingfilm.com

Director and Producer: Nancy Buirski
Producer and Editor: Elisabeth Haviland James
Screenwriters: Nancy Buirski and Susie Ruth Powell

Mildred and Richard Loving, 1965 (Photograph by Grey Villet)

Mildred and Richard Loving never imagined that their unassuming love story would be the basis of a watershed civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional. But in 1967, when this soft-spoken interracial couple are exiled from Virginia—the only home they have ever known—for the crime of merely falling in love and getting married, they feel they have no choice but to fight back. Through extraordinary archival footage, director Nancy Buirski brings this tumultuous history back to life, and anchors it in a timely discourse on marriage equality. — SS

For more information, click here.

Note from Steven F. Riley: My wife Julia and I will attend the Friday, 2011-06-24 screening.

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations: Mixed-Heritage Families in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn, New York

April 2011

Project Description

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) is a public programming series and oral history project about mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, culture, and identity, infused with historical perspective. CBBG is currently in the planning phase (April 2011 – March 2012) and will result in a multi-faceted interpretive website expected to be completed in 2015.

By providing a public forum for conversations about mixed-heritage families, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations will inform the dialogue with historical perspectives on social constructions of race, ethnicity, and community; changes in immigration and citizenship laws and practices; and changes in marriage and partnership laws and practices. Through an interpretive website, online discussions initiated and led by scholars, public programs and events, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) will invite the public to share their own stories, respond to other people’s stories, react to, and learn from scholarly interpretations of these stories…

…Scholarly Advisors

Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Oral History Research Office
Columbia University

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Keren R. McGinity, History
University of Michigan

Suleiman Osman, Assistant Professor of American Studies
George Washington University

Renee Romano, History
Oberlin College

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor of History
Kent State University

Karen Woods Weierman, Associate Professor of English (Literary History)
Worcestor State University

Project Staff

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History
Brooklyn Historical Society

For more information, click here. View the PDF brochure here.

The Madeleine Brand Show with Ulli K. Ryder

The Madeleine Brand Show
KPCC 89.3 FM, Southern California Public Radio
Monday, 2011-06-20, 16:00-17:00Z (09:00-10:00 PDT, Local Time)

Madeleine Brand, Host

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

Ms. Brand and Ms. Ryder will be discussing multiracial students and college admissions.

Listen to the live broadcast here.

Saturday Night with Esme Murphy Featuring Ulli K. Ryder

Saturday Night with Esme Murphy
WCCO News Radio 830
Minneapolis, Minnesota
2011-06-18, 23:00-03:00Z (18:00-22:00 CDT/19:00-23:00 EDT/16:00-20:00 PDT)

Esme Murphy, Host

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

The interview will air this Saturday, 2011-06-18 at 19:05 CDT (Local Time) [20:05 EDT, 17:05 PDT] and Ms. Murphy and Ms. Ryder will also be discussing multiracial students and college admissions.  For wordwide listeners, the broadcast date/time is Sunday, 2011-06-19 at 00:05Z.

Listen to the interview here (00:11:48).

Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2011-06-13

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

Call it a quarter-life crisis. A change in the winds, perhaps. Maybe it’s my sad stack of rejection letters from graduate schools. Whatever the case may be, of late, I’ve been having a bit of an intellectual, (even vaguely political) existential crisis when it comes to “mixed-race” issues. So, almost two years since I embarked on my self-proclaimed crusade toward a radical engagement with mixed issues, it’s about that time to remind myself of the basics that started it all…

…Mixed-Consciouness: In Search of a Political Education

Political education is crucial and yet, many of us are painfully deficient. For me political education is about developing a critical consciousness- a fancy word for a way of thinking and being and perhaps, most importantly understanding who we are and how we fit (and don’t fit) into wider systems and structures of power, privelege and opression we are all a part of. Since mixed folk have historically never been recognized as legitimate social or political subjects in this country, figuring out who we are let alone how we fit into these systems can be a struggle to say the least.

So how do we politically educate and raise consciousness—individually and collectively? Well, for me it starts with taking a look back into our pasts. Now, the type of reading and understanding of history I’m taking about is not this often random, ahistorical revisionist type that attempts to reclaim “mixed-race” people of the past and present: DuBois was mixed and so is Slash!!!Wooot!!! (though very cool, nonetheless). Our history is there, between the lines of colonial history, Native histories, slavery, U.S. expansion, immigration, Asian-American history, Latina/o & Chicana/o histories,  U.S. military imperialism etc etc.—we’re all there, we are and our ancestors are all part of these histories—even me, with parents who didn’t come to this country until the early 70s. My history is nevertheless tied to immigrant histories and policies that made it possible for my parents to come here, my connection to black, Latin@ and East Indian histories are rooted in my parent’s identities as part of the wider African and Indian diasporas and systems of global colonialism and imperialism that spread millions around the world over centuries and subjected them to the phenomenon of racialization…

Read the entire article here.

Africa’s Latin Quarter

The Walrus
July 2008 (Escape: Summer 2008)

Stephen Henighan

Despite bleak poverty, Mozambique’s multi-ethnic literary culture thrives

In downtown Maputo, the monument to the origins of apartheid is just off Karl Marx Street. Maputo, with its manageable proportions, dreamy views over Delagoa Bay, and cosmopolitan restaurant scene, is one of Africa’s most pleasant capital cities. I walked to the apartheid monument through windblown red dust and young people lugging buckets of water into high-rise buildings. Most modern conveniences—such as traffic lights, credit cards, and cellphones—work in Maputo, but a few, such as the water supply in apartments, are unreliable.

Mozambican literary culture, which I’d come to Maputo to explore, is rooted in the country’s history as a Portuguese colony that gained its independence through a Marxist-Leninist revolution in 1975, and in its proximity to neighbouring South Africa. Nowhere are this history’s contradictions more evident than in the Louis Trichardt Memorial Garden. On the back wall of a patio sunk below the street, a plaster frieze depicts Trichardt, a stout Afrikaner, leading oxen through the wilderness in the late 1830s. A trilingual inscription in Afrikaans, Portuguese, and English, under the heading “They Harnessed the Wilds,” lauds the Portuguese colonialists for their hospitality to the South African Voortrekkers, and their solidarity in fighting off “native tribesmen.” Most self-respecting Marxist revolutions would have demolished this racist kitsch, but Mozambique, a coastal nation with a tolerance for strangers, prefers to allow all the dissonant chords of its past to resonate at once.

“Mozambique is a crossroads,” Mia Couto, the country’s best-known writer, tells me. “Things happened here that are unique in the history of Africa. There’s an acceptance of others, a way of receiving others, that I haven’t found in other African countries. This doesn’t mean that we’re better than others, but rather that there’s a very long history of relating to outsiders.”…

…Mozambique’s racial mixing dates back to between AD 300 and 800, when a vast wave of people of Indonesian descent invaded the East African coastline. Travelling in coastal Mozambique, I passed through areas inhabited by tiny, fine-boned people with remotely Asian physiques. The African languages spoken by these people contain vestiges of Malay vocabulary. There was even significant trade with China, and the spread of Islam brought a tradition of marriage alliances with the Arab traders who dominated Mozambique’s economy in the early Middle Ages. The residue of this period is evident not only in the high-cheekboned racial inheritance of people in northern Mozambique, but in the country’s many mosques, ranging from the Aga Khan’s shimmering Ismaili mosque in downtown Maputo to the tiny, green-painted huts used for worship in villages. Too poor to build minarets, the villages designate their mosques with crescents raised on poles.

Portuguese colonialism, which began with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498, intensified Mozambique’s racial mixing. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, unable to manage the sprawling, distant colony, Lisbon assigned Mozambique’s governance to the Viceroyalty of Goa, the Indian jewel in the crown of the Portuguese empire. In defiance of every stereotype of colonialism, Africans in Mozambique had a European language imposed on them by administrators who were ethnically Indian. Many of these Portuguese-speaking Indian civil servants or adventurers intermarried with local leaders. In the Zambezi Valley, in central Mozambique, mixed Indo-Portuguese-African elites broke away from government structures to form autonomous settlements known as prazos.

In the nineteenth century, these palisaded outposts fought a sixty-year war of resistance against Portuguese colonial authority, only succumbing to the central government in 1902. Miscegenation between Europeans and Africans was less common in Mozambique than in other Portuguese colonies, such as Angola or the Cape Verde islands, but the roots of Mozambican identity spring from a tradition that assumes everyone descends in part from an outsider.

The frelimo guerrilla movement, which led Mozambique to independence from Portugal in 1975, promoted interracialism and the Portuguese language—at the time spoken by just a sliver of the country’s population—as the keys to building a nation from the more than twenty distinct ethnic and linguistic groups inhabiting the country’s long Indian Ocean coastline. Photographs of early meetings of the new government, in the Museum of the Revolution in downtown Maputo, reveal a sprinkling of white, mixed-race, and South Asian faces among the black majority…

Read the entire article here.