Mixed Race Studies

The Octoroon: A Play, In Four Acts

First Performed at the Winter Garden Theatre
New York, New York
December, 1859

Dion Boucicault, ESQ (1820-1890)

Text from James A. Cannavino Library, Marist University, Poughkeepsie, New York

Read the entire play here.

NHUM3031 Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity

The New School
Fall 2009

Tracyann Williams, Instructor

Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity: “Passing,” a term traditionally used to describe fair-skinned Blacks posing as whites, is, in fact, part of a broader cultural phenomenon that has its origins in the pursuit of “the American Dream.” For the sake of economic comforts, racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse individuals submerge certain aspects of their identity in order to “pass” into the community of “whiteness.” Passing comes with obvious advantages, but for some, great personal sacrifice. We read Helen Fremont’s memoir detailing the ethnic (and religious) journey taken by her parents, Nella Larsen’s multilayered novel Passing, and Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of gender-crossing jazz musician Billy Tipton. We examine how particular individuals become white while whiteness remains unattainable by others. We draw on “whiteness studies,” an interdisciplinary field that decenters hegemonic markers connected to white dominance, and through this lens, we explore the racial, ethnic, and sexual biases embedded in our culture that have propelled individuals to reinvent themselves. At the dawn of the 21st century, these biases are supposedly less potent. We test this assumption by examining passing in the contemporary context.

“A Being of a New World:” The Ambiguity of Mixed Blood in Pauline Johnson’s “My Mother”

MELUS
Volume 27, Number 3, Native American Literature (Autumn, 2002)
pages 43-56

Margo Lukens, Associate Professor of English
University of Maine

Studying mixed-blood/Métis history reveals that an overwhelming number of unions between Europeans and Native people happened between a European man and a Native woman. Sylvia Van Kirk has illustrated this demographic pattern in her work on the importance of Native women to the development of the fur trade in Canada; others, such as Jennifer Brown, corroborate the story of the creation of the Métis people by men from France or the British Isles and women from “the country,” members of Native groups who were instrumental in helping white men survive and establish their link to North American land. A specific mythology describing the men and women of these cross-cultural unions, and their children as well, grew in the imaginations of the Europeans intent upon describing their own occupation of the land and what they came to conceive of as their Manifest Destiny to spread the civilization they knew over the face of the continent. The mythology typified the Native women of these unions as drudges and as sexual temptresses, ready to cleave to their white spouses or melt inconspicuously back into their tribes once their husbands left them behind to care for their unacknowledged and genetically compromised children. The European men could, in this mythology, choose to return to French or English wives without penalty for their foray “into the country;” only those who chose to thrust their mixed-blood children upon society’s notice or “squaw-men” who remained with Native wives for life risked social disapproval and marginaliation.

What, then, of the handful of people experiencing unions with the genders reversed? Perhaps because of the Europeans’ inability to imagine these unions, they are largely undescribed by the mythology; perhaps because historical circumstance brought European men to America in large numbers without European women as companions, there was little necessity for a descriptive mythology to arise, except perhaps as a prohibitive tool; perhaps the fear of exposing their women to the attentions of men from outside shaped the European colonial project to be a male journey into an unknown and feminine landscape. Whatever the reasons, no comparable mythology existed for the union of a Native man and European woman. (2) In the work of Pauline Johnson, daughter of a Mohawk man and an English woman, we can see the tension generated by an attempt to create such a mythology of self-identity.

Pauline Johnson was born in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve in the Grand River valley near Brantford, Ontario, the daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, a Mohawk chief who was one-quarter Dutch, and Emily Susanna Howells, whose family had emigrated from England when she was eight years old. Because Canadian law identified as Indians women whose fathers or husbands were Indians, her status was Indian even though five of her eight great-grandparents were Europeans. She grew up in an English-style household on the Reserve, where she was educated partly by an English governess at home and partly at the Reserve school, idealizing the Indianness of her father and learning to claim the Mohawk part of her heritage with pride; as her biographer Betty Keller says, Pauline Johnson “credited everything in which she excelled to her Indian blood” (54)…

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Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Pennsylvania State University Press
2006
384 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-271-02883-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-271-03288-7

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Although both Brazil and the United States inherited European norms that accorded whites privileged status relative to all other racial groups, the development of their societies followed different trajectories in defining white/black relations. In Brazil pervasive miscegenation and the lack of formal legal barriers to racial equality gave the appearance of its being a “racial democracy,” with a ternary system of classifying people into whites (brancos), multiracial individuals (pardos), and blacks (pretos) supporting the idea that social inequality was primarily associated with differences in class and culture rather than race. In the United States, by contrast, a binary system distinguishing blacks from whites by reference to the “one-drop rule” of African descent produced a more rigid racial hierarchy in which both legal and informal barriers operated to create socioeconomic disadvantages for blacks.

But in recent decades, Reginald Daniel argues in this comparative study, changes have taken place in both countries that have put them on “converging paths.” Brazil’s black consciousness movement stresses the binary division between brancos and negros to heighten awareness of and mobilize opposition to the real racial discrimination that exists in Brazil, while the multiracial identity movement in the U.S. works to help develop a more fluid sense of racial dynamics that was long felt to be the achievement of Brazil’s ternary system.

Against the historical background of race relationsin Brazil and the U.S. that he traces in Part I of the book, including a review of earlier challenges to their respective racial orders, Daniel focuses in Part II on analyzing the new racial project on which each country has embarked, with attention to all the political possibilities and dangers they involve.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Historical Foundation
  • 1. Eurocentrism: Racial Formation and the Master Racial Project
  • 2. The Brazilian Path: The Ternary Racial Project
  • 3. The Brazilian Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Ternary Racial Project
  • 4. The U.S. Path: The Binary Racial Project
  • 5. The U.S. Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Binary Racial Project
• Part II. Converging Paths
  • 6. A New U.S. Racial Order: The Demise of Jim Crow Segregation
  • 7. A New Brazilian Racial Order: A Decline in the Racial Democracy Ideology
  • 8. The U.S. Convergence: Toward the Brazilian Path
  • 9. The Brazilian Convergence: Toward the U.S. Path
• Epilogue: The U.S. and Brazilian Racial Orders: Changing Points of Reference
• Notes
• References
• Index

Note on the Skin-Colour of the Crosses Between Negro and White

Biometrika
Volume 6, Number 4 (March 1909)
pages 348-353
DOI: 10.1093/biomet/6.4.348

Karl Pearson (1857-1936), F.R.S.

Those who feel compelled at present to hold their final judgment with regard to Mendelism in suspense, who do not think the statistical proof of its generality by any means yet complete, and who still question on logical grounds many of the statements made with regard to it, have nevertheless been ready to emphasise the paramount service of Mendel in drawing attention to the great factor of segregation in many inheritance problems. This admission can be made without overlooking the facts—too often disregarded—that segregation is not a universal principle, that it is, where it does occur, often incomplete, and that even where it occurs and is more or less complete it does not necessarily follow the simple Mendelian ratios. The theory of the “pure gamete,” the “unit character” and the  “allelomorph” may have aided, suggested and controlled much experimental work on inheritance, but this theory has undoubtedly been pushed—chiefly by young and enthusiastic disciples of Mendelism, who thought that at last a formula of heredity requiring no mathematical knowledge had been discovered—far beyond the limits of actual experimental work, or in some cases beyond the inferences allowable from the data actually observed. The public has been dosed by the general Mendelian practitioner with:

(DR) x (DR) = (DD) + 2(DR) + (RR)

and told that it solved all difficulties. But the higher consultants know that at the very best many complications arise, that even in segregation transitional forms occur occasionally or even frequently, and that “unit characters” are not independent but often highly correlated. They are also fully conscious that much straining of the theory of probability often is needed to make the ratios fit a simple Mendelian formula. The reason for these prefatory remarks lies in the fact that some time ago it was asserted by an ardent Mendelian that skin colour in crosses between dark and light skinned races would probably be found to obey Mendelian principles.   It had been hitherto almost universally accepted that skin colour did…

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The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s

Journal of American History
Volume 87, Issue 1 (June 2000)
pages 43-56
DOI: 10.2307/2567914

Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

In January of 1857 Jane Morrison was sold in the slave market in New Orleans. The man who bought her was James White, a longtime New Orleans slave trader, who had recently sold his slave pen and bought land just up the river from New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Morrison, apparently, was to be one of his last speculations as a trader or one of his first investments as a planter. Sometime shortly after her sale, however, Morrison ran away. By the time White saw her again, in October 1857, they were in a courtroom in Jefferson Parish where Morrison had filed suit against him. Before it was settled, that suit would be considered by three different juries, be put before the Louisiana Supreme Court twice, and leave a lasting record of the complicated politics of race and slavery in the South of the 1850s. The reason for the stir would have been obvious to anyone who saw Morrison sitting in court that day: the fifteen-year-old girl whom White claimed as his slave had blond hair and blue eyes.

Morrison began her petition to the Third District Court by asking that William Dennison, the Jefferson Parish jailer, be appointed her legal representative and that she be sequestered in the parish prison to keep White from seizing and selling her. In her petition, Morrison asked that she be declared legally free and white and added a request that the court award her ten thousand dollars damages for the wrong that White had done her by holding her as a slave. She based her case on the claim that her real name was Alexina, not Jane, that she was from Arkansas, and that she had “been born free and of white parentage,” or, as she put it in a later affidavit, “that she is of white blood and free and entitled to her freedom and that on view this is manifest.” Essentially, Alexina Morrison claimed that she was white because she looked that way.

In his response, White claimed that he had purchased Morrison (he still called her Jane) from a man named J. A. Halliburton, a resident of Arkansas. White exhibited an unnotarized bill of sale for Morrison (which would have been legal proof of title in Arkansas, but was not in Louisiana) and offered an alternative explanation of how the young woman had made her way into the courtroom that day. Morrison, he alleged, was a runaway slave. Indeed, he said, he had it on good authority that Morrison had been “induced” to run away from him by a group of self-styled “philanthropists” who were “in reality acting the part of abolitionists.” In particular, White blamed Dennison, whom he accused of having used his position to “incourage” Morrison to run away and of having “afterwards harboured her, well knowing that she was a runaway.” White was drawing his terminology from the criminal laws of the state of Louisiana and accusing Dennison and his shadowy “abolitionist” supporters of committing a crime: stealing and harboring his slave.

The record of the contest that followed is largely contained in the transcription that was made of the records from the lower court hearings of the case when the state supreme court considered Morrison v. White for the final time in 1862. As codified in the statutes of the state of Louisiana and generally interpreted by the Louisiana Supreme Court, the legal issues posed by the case were simple enough: If Alexina Morrison could prove she was white, she was entitled to freedom and perhaps to damages; if James White could prove that her mother had been a slave at the time of Morrison’s birth or that Morrison herself had been a slave (and had not been emancipated), he was entitled to her service; if she was not proved to be either white or enslaved, her fate would be decided by the court on the basis of a legal presumption of “mulattoes’” freedom under Louisiana law. Captured in the neat hand of the legal clerk who prepared the record of the lower court hearings of the case, however, are circumstances that were apparently considerably more complicated than the ones envisioned by those who had made the laws.

Testimony from the lower court hearings of Morrison v. White provides a pathway into the complex history of slavery, class, race, and sexuality in the changing South of the 1850s: particularly into slaveholders’ fantasies about their light-skinned and female slaves; the role of performance in the racial identities of both slaves and slaveholders; the ways anxieties about class and capitalist transformation in the South were experienced and expressed as questions about racial identity; the babel of confusion surrounding the racial ideal on which the antebellum social structure was supposedly grounded; the relationship of the law of slavery as made by legislators and appellate judges to its everyday life in the district courtrooms of the antebellum South; and the disruptive effects of one woman’s effort to make her way to freedom through the tangle of ideology that enslaved her body. In the South of the 1850s, Alexina Morrison’s bid for freedom posed a troubling double question: Could slaves become white? And could white people become slaves?

Whiteness and Slavery

By the time Morrison v. White went to trial, Alexina Morrison would claim that her whiteness made her free, but when Morrison and White first met, in the slave market, it might simply have made her more valuable. It is well known that slaveholders favored light-skinned women such as Morrison to serve in their houses and that those light-skinned women sold at a price premium. What is less often realized is that in the slave market apparent differences in skin tone were daily formalized into racial categories—the traders were not only marketing race but also making it. In the slave market, the whiteness that Alexina Morrison would eventually try to turn against her slavery was daily measured, packaged, and sold at a very high price.

The alchemy by which skin tone and slavery were synthesized into race and profit happened so quickly that it has often gone unnoticed. When people such as Morrison were sold, they were generally advertised by the slave traders with a racial category. Ninety percent of the slaves sold in the New Orleans market were described on the Acts of Sale that transferred their ownership with a word describing their lineage in terms of an imagined blood quantum—such as “Negro,” “Griffe,” “Mulatto,” or “Quadroon.” Those words described pasts that were not visible in the slave pens by referring to parents and grandparents who had been left behind with old owners. In using them, however, the traders depended upon something that was visible in the pens, skin color. When buyers described their slave market choices they often made the same move from the visible to the biological. When, for example, they described slaves as “a griff colored boy,” or “not black, nor Mulatto, but what I believe is usually called a griff color, that is a Brownish Black, or a bright Mulatto,” buyers were seeing color, but they were looking for lineage.6 The words the buyers used—griffe, mulatto, quadroon—preserved a constantly shifting tension between the “blackness” favored by those who bought slaves to till their fields, harvest their crops, and renew their labor forces and the “whiteness” desired by those who went to the slave market in search of people to serve their meals, mend their clothes, and embody their fantasies. They sectioned the restless hybridity, the infinite variety of skin tone that was visible all over the South, into imagined degrees of black and white that, once measured, could be priced and sold…

Read the entire article here.

“Quadroon” Balls in the Spanish Period

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 14, Number 3 (Summer, 1973)
pages 310-315

Translated and Edited by

Ronald R. Morazan, Assistant Professor of History
Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

With the influx of free blacks into Spanish Louisiana from the island of Santo Domingo, the Spanish authorities provided them with special privileges to hold public dances which eventually became known as “quadroon balls.” Soon after the public dance hall for whites was established in 1792, Governor Carondelct granted Santiago Bernardo Coquet the privilege of giving weekly a public dance for the blacks. Preferring black women, as they were “less demanding,” the white men began patronaing the dance hall for blacks. To correct this situation, Gabriel Fonvergne, the Attorney General (Sindico Procurador General) of the Cabildo, asked the City Council to petition Governor Carondelet to prohibit slaves from entering the dance hall. The governor, because of numerous complaints and objections from slave owners, refused the request of the Cabildo and the attorney general but decided instead to prohibit white people from going into the dances for blacks. Permission to continue the dances was given by the following administration, which was that of Don Manuel Gayoso de Lcmos, but after his death, the new Attorney General of the Cabildo, Don Pedro Dulcido Barran, asked the City Council to petition Acting Civil Governor Don Nicolas Maria Vidal to abolish the dances once and for all; however, Governor Vidal refused…

Creole Angel: The Self-Identity of the Free People of Color of Antebellum New Orleans

University of North Texas
August 2006
136 pages

Ben Melvin Hobratsch

Thesis Prepared for the Degree of Masters of Arts, University of North Texas, August 2006

This thesis is about the self-identity of antebellum New Orleans’s free people of color. The emphasis of this work is that French culture, mixed Gallic and African ancestry, and freedom from slavery served as the three keys to the identity of this class of people. Taken together, these three factors separated the free people of color from the other major groups residing in New Orleans—Anglo-Americans, white Creoles and black slaves.

The introduction provides an overview of the topic and states the need for this study. Chapter 1 provides a look at New Orleans from the perspective of the free people of color. Chapter 2 investigates the slaveownership of these people. Chapter 3 examines the published literature of the free people of color. The conclusion summarizes the significance found in the preceding three chapters and puts their findings into a broader interpretive framework.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• Chapters
  • 1. THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR’S ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS
  • 2. THE SLAVEHOLDING OF NEW ORLEANS’S SLAVEHOLDING FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1820-1840
  • 3. THE LITERATURE OF NEW ORLEANS’S FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1837-1845
• CONCLUSION
• Appendices
  • A. CENSUS SLAVE SCHEDULES, 1820-1840
  • B. EMANCIPATION PETITIONS, 1814-1843
• BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Free people of color, or gens de couleur libres, were men and women of either African or mixed African and European ancestry that were legally free from slavery, yet were proscribed in their social condition by the law. These men and women had always played a significant role within New Orleans. This was due, in part, to their sheer numbers. In New Orleans in 1840, for instance, free people of color numbered 19,226 of a total population of 102,193 or 18.8% of the population. Only Baltimore, Maryland could claim relatively similar numbers of free people of color. Of Baltimore’s total population of 102,313 in 1840, 17,967 or 17.5% were free people of color. Other southern cities did not even come close to approaching such levels. In the same year, in Charleston, another southern city in which a significant population of free men and women of color resided, only 5.4% of the population or 1,588 of a total population of 29,261 were free people of color.

The important role of free men and women of color within New Orleans was also due to the fact that until the implementation of American order in Louisiana in 1803, there had existed a tripartite socioracial stratification within the city, along the Latin model. This non-Anglo socioracial stratification allowed the gens de couleur libres to enjoy more social rights than free people of color in any other area of North America, in addition to near-equality with whites in regards to legal rights. In the Anglo-dominated United States, a binary socioracial hierarchy existed that placed free people of color at the same level as enslaved men and women of color.

The tripartite socioracial stratification of colonial New Orleanian society was one of fracture and fragmentation (see Table 0.1). One’s place in society was determined by economic and racial factors. As with most societies, individuals in antebellum New Orleans were categorized based upon their economic status. Individuals were wealthy, poor, or somewhere in between.

Factors of racial ancestry complicated a purely economic classification. Individuals, regardless of their economic status, were labeled white, black or “of color” (somewhere in between). In antebellum New Orleans, an individual’s racial phenotype took precedence over wealth. As a result New Orleanian society was first ordered by skin color, then, within each of the three separate racial groups, by economic condition. Within this Latin-style tripartite social stratification, the free people of color occupied the middle strata. As occupants of the middle strata, free people of color were viewed as socially “below” whites (of whatever economic condition) and “above” all black slaves…

Read the entire thesis here.

Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color

Louisiana State University Press
August 2000
344 pages
Trim: 6 x 9 , Illustrations: 14 halftones
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-2601-1

Edited by:

Sybil Kein (born Consuela Marie Moore), Distinguished Professor of English Emerita
University of Michigan

The word Creole evokes a richness rivaled only by the term’s widespread misunderstanding. Now both aspects of this unique people and culture are given thorough, illuminating scrutiny in Creole, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana’s Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the volume wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture while fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic.

The collection opens with a historically relevant perspective found in Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s 1916 piece “People of Color of Louisiana” and continues with contemporary writings: Joan M. Martin on the history of quadroon balls; Michel Fabre and Creole expatriates in France; Barbara Rosendale Duggal with a debiased view of Marie Laveau; Fehintola Mosadomi and the downtrodden roots of Creole grammar; Anthony G. Barthelemy on skin color and racism as an American legacy; Caroline Senter on Reconstruction poets of political vision; and much more. Violet Harrington Bryan, Lester Sullivan, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sybil Kein, Mary Gehman, Arthé A. Anthony, and Mary L. Morton offer excellent commentary on topics that range from the lifestyles of free women of color in the nineteenth century to the Afro-Caribbean links to Creole cooking.

By exploring the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time, Creole goes far in diminishing past and present stereotypes of this exuberant segment of our society. A study that necessarily embraces issues of gender, race and color, class, and nationalism, it speaks to the tensions of an increasingly ethnically mixed mainstream America.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I HISTORY
  • 1 People of Color in Louisiana – Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
  • 2 Marcus Christian’s Treatment of Les Gens de Couloir Libre – Violet Harrington Bryan
  • 3 Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre: How Race and Sex Defined the Lifestyles of Free Women of Color – Joan M. Martin
  • 4 Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History Behind the Music – Lester Sullivan
  • 5 The Yankee Hugging the Creole: Reading Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon – Jennifer DeVere Brody
  • 6 The Use of Louisiana Creole in Southern Literature – Sybil Kein
• II LEGACY
  • 7 Marie Laveau: The Voodoo Queen Repossessed – Barbara Rosendale Duggal
  • 8 New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France: Romance and Reality – Michel Fabre
  • 9 Visible Means of Support: Businesses, Professions, and Trades of Free People of Color – Mary Gehman
  • 10 The Origin of Louisiana Creole – Fehintola Mosadomi
  • 11 Louisiana Creole Food Culture: Afro-Caribbean Links – Sybil Kein
  • 12 Light, Bright, Damn Near White: Race, the Politics of Genealogy, and the Strange Case of Susie Guillory – Anthony G. Barthelemy
  • 13 Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation – Caroline Senter
  • 14 “Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans – Arthé Anthony
  • 15 Creole Culture in the Poetry of Sybil Kein – Mary L. Morton
• Contributors
• Index

Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-22

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV…

…“I started noticing more the popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explained when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society, I would like to see more attention to literature, performance and art that is using the debates about mixed race to think more carefully about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”…

…Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting that she feels so different from everyone else, even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it.”

Elam said the strip sparked anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character so flatly dismissed Jazmine’s desire to be biracial.  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including Baby Halfie, the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The plaything was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. “The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”…

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