Mixed Race Studies

Prologue: the riddle of race

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 4-14
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563141

Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English and ALANA [African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans] US Ethnic Studies
University of Vermont

James Vellacott, ‘President Obama shakes the hand of PC Michael Zamora on the way into Number 10’, London, 1 April 2009. Credit: Mirrorpix.

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard’s essay on the case of race in the United States.

Post black

A classroom at an Ivy League university. A black professor at the helm. The audience, a palette of skin colours. Black, white and brown bodies have come here for answers: answers to the puzzle of race.

The professor calls herself African American but she was born in Italy, not in the United States, and has she never been to Africa. Her racial identity is born of a sense of affinity; it is, essentially, a choice. Because her skin is brown, no one questions this choice. Everyone in this room, in fact, equates this affinity with authority, which is why her lecture on the meaning of race goes unchallenged.

Today, the professor is not really talking about race, but not-race. She tells us, her multicoloured audience, that race no longer holds meaning, that it never held meaning, that it is a fiction or, in academic language, a construction.

Most of us, including me, nod our heads. That is, except for one young woman, a student at the law school, who raises her hand and waits to be recognized.

‘Look, I don’t really understand what you mean when you say that “race is a construction”. Race is real, and I know what it is. I’m black. It’s where I’m from and how I live.’

The professor turns to address the woman directly. Her tone is agreeable and her gestures are sympathetic, but her language does not change. She continues to speak in the artful theoretical vocabulary that has brought her to international prominence. She seems as frustrated as the young woman that her words cannot bridge the gulf between them. In the academic world in which I was trained, we were taught to view lived experience with suspicion, and to dismiss emotion as a meaningful category of analysis. Time is up. People stand to speak to the professor, to thank her for her insights and congratulate her on her work, except for the law student, who heads directly for the door.

Such dramas are being played out in classrooms around the country these days, including my own…

…Race is a fiction. When we use it to narrate our experience in the world, we take the easy way out, and neglect other factors that name and place us. The easy way out is a one-way street; our real lives are lived at the intersections, where race meets class meets gender and so on. Inextricably intertwined is what we are; the boundaries to which we pledge ourselves do not exist. Underneath the umbrella of race, categories like gender, sexuality, class, even geography, are also invisibly huddled. Each of these categories contains its own story, a story that intersects with the story of race, but a story that race alone cannot encompass. In other words, a different kind of blackness—a different story—is lived in, say, Northern California than in rural Mississippi. To be gay, black and rich—or straight, white and poor—in these respective places adds more meaning to the experience of race than the term ‘race’ can communicate. Identity honours no borders, neither in language nor in life.

But the fact that race is a fiction does not rob it of meaning. Certainly, race is an invention, but that doesn’t make it untrue…

Read the entire article here.

How to read Michelle Obama

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 95 – 117
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563149

Maria Lauret, Reader in American Studies
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Michelle Obama’s role as the first African American First Lady is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation as a professional woman, mother and spouse is directed towards a wider representativeness that is new in American political discourse. As a descendant of slaves and slave owners whose American ancestry can be traced back to the 1850s, she can lay claim to an African American legacy that the President lacks. As a result, some of her more controversial statements during the presidential campaign about the black family, class mobility and national pride need to be read in the context of an African American literature and historiography that challenges the American creed of equality, liberty and unconditional love of one’s country. Michelle Obama’s family history, her Princeton undergraduate thesis and her own words in interviews are analysed here in the discursive context of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave-girl, as well as the historiography of the civil rights movement. Such a reading reveals how Michelle Obama’s background weaves the legacy of slavery into the American fabric, and shows that a redemptive construction of American history—in which the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Obama presidency are taken as fulfilment of the American creed (and of Martin Luther King’s dream)—must be refused if a new national self-definition with African America at its heart is to take its place.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans

The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995)
pages 291-312

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles

On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio,
on sunny Sunday afternoons
when the kids look all new
and far too clean to stay that way,
and Harlem has its
washed-and-ironed-and-cleaned-best out,
the ones who’ve crossed the line
to live downtown
miss you,
Harlem of the bitter dream,
since their dream has
come true.

—Langston Hughes, 1951

Racial passing is a well-known theme in pre-World War II African-American literature. Adrian Piper’s recent essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” is an example of continued interest in the topic. In addition, “passing” is used in cultural studies as a metaphor for masking the real-and most often marginalized-self. This article examines racial passing, with an emphasis on the lives of black Creole women, in relation to the economic impact of racial repression and segregation on black life in New Orleans. My conclusions are drawn, in large part, from an analysis of thirty extensive oral history interviews that I conducted with eighteen women and twelve men born between 1885 and 1905, and living in downtown New Orleans in 1977. Each of the men and women that I interviewed thought of themselves as “Creole,” and participated in the familial and social networks of the city’s black Creole community.

Their occupations and educations were representative of the choices then available in New Orleans. All of them worked, although the kind of work that they did changed over the life cycle; they were primarily cigar makers, seamstresses, skilled craftsmen in the building trades, postal carriers, printers, and school teachers. A few of them attended the city’s private high schools and normal schools, an accomplishment that has to be understood within the context of the limited availability of an education-private or public-for African-Americans at the turn of the century. Many others were forced to terminate their educations, in more than one instance as early as the third grade, to begin working, whereas others finished apprenticeships. Their personal lives were equally varied as reflected in the extended, nuclear and augmented households in which they lived, and their individual experiences with parenting, divorce and remarriage, as well as widowhood and desertion. Most, but not all of them, were Catholics. Despite their individual differences, as a group the Creoles of color that I interviewed shared first-hand experiences with hard work and racial discrimination. The women-a group that has been overlooked in New Orleans historiography-experienced both racial and sexual discrimination.

Each of the men and women I interviewed offered insightful interpretations of the worlds in which they lived. They were all very familiar with the myriad practices of racial passing; although they were not all light-skinned, they all knew of individuals-often a parent, spouse or friend-who had passed. More important than examples of the intricate mechanics of passing were their observations about the reasons individuals did so. Lillian Gelbart Simonet, for example, born in 1904, identified a relationship between passing for white and poverty when she remarked:

There are whole families of these people in New Orleans, (who are not necessarily Creoles), who have just been absorbed and gone to various parts of the country and they’re white. Sometimes you just can’t blame them because they have had a hard time. Creole people, with all of the airs, had a hard time to get along [because] they [the young women] would not be domestics. Some were fortunate enough to get work at El Trelles, a cigar factory . . . and Wallace Marine had a cigar factory . . . they weren’t prepared to do any kind of work that required any kind of education at all because half of them hadn’t finished high school.”

The observations of Mrs. Simonet, a retired public school teacher, call attention to the limited opportunities available to the majority of black Creoles who were poor and uneducated, unlike herself.

In the larger scheme of twentieth-century American race categorization, individuals were either black or white. Individual whites may have had preferences for light-skinned or dark-skinned African-Americans in their employ.  But overall the ethnic and cultural nuances and phenotypical differences that were critical to the intraracial dynamics of the black community were disregarded by whites in the segregated economy of New Orleans in the 1900s-1920s. Many Creoles of Color consequently were willing to accept the risks of passing for white rather than suffer the deteriorating material and social conditions endured by persons living and working as “colored.”…

…Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection

Indiana University Press
2011-12-23
236 pages
Paper 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4

Nadine Ehlers, Professor
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler’s account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 “racial fraud” case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault’s later work on ethics and “technologies of the self” to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Racial Disciplinarity
• 2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
• 3. Passing through Racial Performatives
• 4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
• 5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
• 6. Imagining Racial Agency
• 7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
• Bibliography
• Index

Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path

Caxton Press
2006
264 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-87004-450-8

Nancy M. Peterson

Nancy M. Peterson tells the stories of mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world.

In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training whites provided and used them to help their people. They found differing paths—medicine, music, crafts, the classroom, the lecture hall, the stage, the written word—and walked strong and tall.

These women did far more than survive; they extended a hand to help their people find a place in a hard new future.

Spit Back a Boy: Poems by Iain Haley Pollock

The University of Georgia Press
2011-06-15
72 pages
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3908-5

Iain Haley Pollock, English Teacher
Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Winner of the 2010 The Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Iain Haley Pollock’s poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, “Sea, you is ugly,” from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book—in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: “I flung my almost white self / into my mother’s embrace—that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker.” Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator’s hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.

Even when these poems soften, they can’t be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock’s collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.

from “Rattla cain’t hold me”

. . . And all our sadness will be old Arkansas,
rural and misspoken, its roads smudged
by the fog’s blue prints, its pine board shacks

daubed with mud to keep out mosquitoes
and the cold. The kitchens and porches
where we aren’t will cease to exist. We’ll miss

rain in autumn dousing the fire of the leaves.
Wind writhing like a water moccasin.
Like convicts we’ll sing, Rattla cain’t hold me

Rattla cain’t hold me, while outside the fence,
poplars, stripped by gypsy moths, stand bare.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

HarperCollins
480 pages
2001
ISBN: 9780060959616

Hans J. Massaquoi (1926-2013)

This is a story of the unexpected. In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Prologue

To write of ones self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of hut few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.
—Frederick Douglass

I could not agree more wich the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom. If, like Mr. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots; Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis; and my former employer and mentor. Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany—an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings—followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.

Four fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.

As a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis. Unlike African-Americans, I did not have the benefit of inherited survival techniques created and perfected by countless ancestors and passed down from generation to generation of oppressed people. Instead, I was forced to traverse a minefield of potential disasters and to develop my own instincts to tell me how best to survive physically and psychologically in a country consumed by racial arrogance and racial hatred and openly committed to the destruction of all “non-Aryans.”

Nazi racists, unlike their white American counterparts, did not commit their atrocities anonymously, disguised in white sheets and under the protection of night. Nor did they operate like some contemporary American politicians who advance their racist agendas by dividing black and white Americans with cleverly disguised code words about “unfair quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “states’ rights.” Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with “inferior” non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin. For all practical purposes—except for the courageous and unflagging support I received from my German mother, who taught me to believe in myself by believing in me and my potential—I faced the constant threat that Nazi ethnic-cleansing policies posed to my safety alone. I faced this threat without the sense of security and reeling of belonging that humans derive from being members of a group, even an embattled one. Because of the absence of black females and the government-imposed taboo of race mixing, I had no legal social outlet when I reached puberty. Unlike the thousands of Africans and so-called “brown babies”—children of black GI fathers and German mothers—who reside in the Federal Republic of Germany today, there simply was no black population to speak of in Germany during the Hitler years, certainly none that I encountered. Not until long after the war did I learn that a small number of black Germans—the tragic so-called “Rhineland bastards” fathered by World War I French and Belgian colonial occupation troops—were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.

Because Germans of my generation were expected to be fair skinned and of Aryan stock, it became my lot in life to explain ad nauseam why someone who had a brown complexion and black, kinky hair spoke accent-free German and claimed Germany as his place of birth. So let me state here once again, for the record, that I was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, because my grandfather, then consul general of Liberia to Hamburg, had brought with him his sizable family. His oldest son became my father after an intense courtship with my mother, a German nurse. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, my grandfather and father returned to Liberia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves in an increasingly hostile racist environment…

In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby

Skinner House Books (an imprint of the Unitarian Universalist Association)
2008-10-15
288 pages
Product Code: 6989
ISBN-13: 978-1558965416; ISBN-10: 9781558965416

Mark D. Morrison-Reed

Frank personal account of growing up black during the era of the civil rights movement. The author wrestles with racism, the death of Martin Luther King, black radicalism, his interracial family, and his experience as one of the first black Unitarian Universalist ministers.

In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby gives voice to the unspoken story of those Afro Americans who were among the first to bring racial diversity to their neighborhood, school, church or workplace, to the increasing number of partners in interracial relationships and to those blessed with and yet struggling to raise multiracial children in a polarized world.

Mark Morrison Reed discusses the creation of In Between in the video below.

Profit, Power, & Privilege: The Racial Politics of Ancestry
 
American Anthropological Association Meetings
November 18, 2000
San Francisco, California

Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
Duke University

In March of this year each of you received your decennial census, and you were confronted, once again, by those ominous racial boxes. This time, however, you could go ahead and check more than one box. Your ability to check more than one box was a compromise worked out by the Commerce Department and two opposing efforts to lobby the Administration. One effort was launched by people that identify as bi-racial, or of mixed race descent, and who wanted their own box. The other effort was led by the NAACP and the National Council of La Razza who argued that the boxes should remain the same. Although virtually every Latino, Black, or Native American person should go ahead and check “all of the above,” the powerful bi-racial lobby did not want to force their constituents to “choose” between identifying with one ancestor or another. The NAACP and others argued that the census was about identification—not identity—and pressed the Administration to make an accurate count of people who are identified as racial minorities, to gain a better understanding of inter-city demographics, and to maintain the ability to demonstrate disparate impact. These organizations wanted to be able to account for all people identified as black, Hispanic, etc. In this case, the bi-racial lobby viewed race as a proxy for ancestry while the NAACP viewed race as a proxy for political status.

Several months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigenous Hawaiians could not vote in a state-wide election for the commissioners of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an agency that allocates resources set aside when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Since these resources were for the explicit purpose of bettering ” the conditions of Native Hawaiians,” only indigenous Hawaiians could vote for commissioners. The Court deemed the election unconstitutional and invoked the rarely used 15th Amendment, which provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy explained in his majority opinion that “ancestry can be a proxy for race” and therefore ruled the elections unconstitutional. However, elections held by Indian tribes remained Constitutional, Kennedy argued, because of their “unique political status.”

A few years ago, the Lumbee Tribe of Pembroke, North Carolina petitioned the U.S. Congress for federally designated tribal status. At stake was over 70 million federal dollars targeted for health and education. Although members of the Lumbee Tribe have made treaties with the federal government, number 40,000, are recognized as a tribe by the state of North Carolina, and enjoy a very salient “political status,” the federal government in 1994 refused to recognize their tribal status because they did not meet the stringent requirements imposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part of the BIA requirements includes tracing descent from a “historic tribe.” The Lumbees, however, have a mixed ancestry that includes decedents from earlier Hatteras and Cheraw groups. Unlike Western tribes, the Lumbees have participated in the crosscurrents of culture since 1585 when Sir Walter Raleigh embarked upon his ill-fated colony. For centuries, the Lumbees have absorbed the culture and people from neighboring black, white, and Indian populations and today are hard-pressed to meet the requirements set by the BIA that simply ignore processes of culture change. In this case, the Lumbees viewed political status as a proxy for ancestry, but Congress did not.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is the historical end product of a gamy mix of social, political, and economic pressures grinding against each other. Like the tectonics of the earth’s plates, it’s usually slow and predictable, but one never knows when these forces will erupt or quake- forever changing the social landscape. (Here in California, tectonics of all kinds are particularly volatile). Although the outcomes of the cases I briefly described seemed more like a game of “rock-scissors-paper,” they fall within the slow and predictable racial tectonics. From the centuries old “one-drop” rule to the complex fractions used to claim tribal membership; race, culture, and heritage, have always been used inconsistently in a struggle to define social, political, and economic relationships. W.E.B. Du Bois once penned that the concept of race was “a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies” (Du Bois 1986b:651).

I have long thought that this was one of the best definitions of race, but it does not get us very far. Anthropologists are supposed to identify patterns in process, but it is often difficult when such salient modalities in American culture are used willy-nilly by even our most esteemed institutions. Although it appears in the above cases that race, ancestry, and political status are applied in a sort of catch-as-catch-can manner, there is a simple and usually predictable logic that shapes these “contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies”—Profit, Power, and Privilege. Like the investigative reporter who “follows the money,” a scholar is well served if he or she looks for the way people use race to acquire or protect any one of these three “Ps.”…

…Individuals who yoke their identity to categories of race often miss the fact that most people stitch together an ethnic identity from various cultural heritages, and that cultural identity has nothing to do with racial categories. This distinction between race and ethnicity is thrown into vivid relief when I used to walk out my back door and stroll down 125th Street—affectionately know as the “Heart of Harlem.” The everyday lives of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitian, Nigerians, and African Americans commingle and converge in this community in a way that has transposed historic segregation into a form of congregation that exhibits the rich tapestry of the African diaspora.

The question remains, why does the mixed-race lobby insist on using ancestry as a proxy for race? I think the answers lies in the one argument I have not seen made by members of this lobbying effort. People advocating for a mixed race category should also advocate that every racial minority check that box too. Barring recent immigrants, virtually no person today considered Black, Indian, or Hawaiian can trace an uninterrupted genealogy back to Africa, Hawaii, or ancestral tribe. Moreover, everyone with a mythical “Cherokee grandmother,” should be encouraged to check that box.

In lieu of this argument, it appears that these advocates are trying to institutionalize a mixed race category, which in other countries at least, turns on a claim to white privilege. We can learn from South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and even in Louisiana and South Carolina that efforts to institutionalize, not a hybrid heritage, but a mixed race category, actually advances racial injustice and allocates white privilege into the haves, have nots, and have some….

Read the entire paper here.

Science: Passers

TIME Magazine
1946-08-12

Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation’s Negroes—as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. “It is now estimated,” wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier’s last week, “that there are at least between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 persons in the U.S., supposed to be white, who possess Negro blood… Authorities generally agree that between 15,000 and 30,000… Negroes go over to the white side every year.”

Author Asbury’s conclusions are disputed by Sociologist John H. Burma of Grinnell College, who thinks the “authorities” exaggerate. In the American Journal of Sociology he argues that the number of Negroes passing as whites is much smaller.

Facts about Negro “passing” are understandably hard to come by. Guesstimates have depended largely on a pioneering study made in 1921 by Duke University Sociologist Hornell Hart.

Analyzing the U.S. census, he discovered an odd discrepancy in the population of native whites: between 1900 and 1910, the group which was aged 10 to 14 in 1900 somehow grew instead of shrinking. When deaths and emigrations were totaled and deducted, the group mysteriously gained 170,000 in population. Other studies showed that every year some 20,000 Negroes unaccountably disappeared from the census statistics. The obvious explanation: the Negroes had become native “whites.”

Read the entire article here.