Mixed Race Studies

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

Read the entire paper here.

Passing, segregation, and assimilation: How Nella Larsen changed the “Passing” novel

University of Texas, El Paso
December 2010
105 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1483825
ISBN: 9781124390468

Vivian Maguire

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of English

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The relationship between Irene and Clare is at first one of fascination, as the two have lifestyles that intrigue one another. Things quickly start to change however, when Irene concludes that Clare and her husband Brian are having an affair. Irene’s suspicious attitudes toward Clare become hostile and she is more determined than ever to prevent Clare from joining her social circle and perhaps, from taking her place in black society. The novel takes an unexpected turn with a confrontation between John Bellew and Clare. She mysteriously falls to her death through an open window with Irene standing nearby. Clare’s demise is further muddled with a plethora of thoughts that run through Irene’s mind at the time, making her the lead suspect in Clare’s sudden death. Clare’s death is never resolved, leaving that event, like many others in the novel, open for interpretation. Irene, who prides herself on her honesty, has the most befuddled interpretation of how Clare died at the end of the story.

What makes Passing such an extraordinary novel is not only that it avoids the traditional conventions of the passing novel, which are typically concerned with the dire effects of leaving one’s race behind, but it calls those conventions into question. Clare does not redeem herself by returning to the black community; she dies, and possibly at the hands of a woman who was supposed to support her according to racial laws. The reader is compelled to sympathize with Clare while wondering what is wrong with Irene. The answer to that question is of course that Irene subscribes to the very ideas about race and ethics that the majority of Americans were invested in at that time. These racial edicts became far more pressing than the lives of individuals themselves, which Larsen recognized and set out to challenge.

Larsen’s Passing is important because it captures the subtlety and nuance of race relations and identity at this point in American history in a way that other novels of the time failed to do. Larsen did this by using the established genre of the passing novel to create a depiction that draws the reader’s focus to a point deeper than the act of passing itself, and directs it toward the more difficult underlying questions about race relations and racial identity. In the next chapter I will look at the social environment that surrounded the passing phenomenon. I will discuss what social analysts and early authors of passing texts identified as motivations behind passing and examine what Nella Larsen felt actually led individuals to do so. Ultimately I will address what Nella Larsen argues all along: individuals cannot fit into social roles designated by racial categories, and the resulting tension leads to unwarranted racial violence.

In my second chapter, I will address two authors who influenced Nella Larsen to change the traditional passing novel. I will describe how one author, Charles Chesnutt, inspired Larsen to change the traditional passing figure in order to demonstrate that the race problem was not in passing, but adhering to racial constructs. The second author, James Weldon Johnson, inspired Larsen with his satirical take on passing, and motivated her to further challenge the racial restrictions on American society.

In chapter three, I will explore how Larsen uses mirrors, an unreliable narrator, and ambiguous situations to comment on the futile and dangerous affect segregation and assimilation had on American culture. Her use of an untrustworthy, but racially loyal heroine helped to reveal the pitfalls in allowing an entire civilization to be divided by racial and social roles. Finally, I will look at two authors who succeeded Larsen, adopting her position on Americans’ dependency on racial and social roles, and what is lost in succumbing to assimilation. The first author I will discuss, Ralph Ellison, writes a novel that seemingly is not about passing at all, yet his exploration of assimilation illustrates that there is little difference between passing and assimilation to meet social expectations when both require performance and the severing of one’s identity. The second author, Danzy Senna, directly addresses both assimilation and passing as the same with a heroine that passes and assimilates at different intervals in order to avoid discrimination. Neither author offers a solution to the passing problem. Their message resembles Larsen’s in that though race is imagined, society’s dependence on racial divisions is not. To live separately from race is difficult, but possible, and worthwhile in the search for identity.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Crossing the Line: Nella Larsen’s Take on Transcending Racial Boundaries
• Shroud of Ethics: Nella Larsen and the Traditional Passing Novel
• Mirror on the Wall: What Nella Larsen’s Ambiguous Novel Reveals About Passing
• Passing in Time: Nella Larsen’s Impact on the Passing Novel
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita

Introduction

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, was forcibly removed and then jailed for sitting in the whites-only section of a railroad car in Louisiana. Plessy disputed these events in the Supreme Court in 1896, where he argued that his black ancestry was imperceptible, and that he was by all definitions a white person. The Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s exclusion from the white railroad car was not a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because while the amendment was created to ensure that all men are treated equally, it was never intended to eliminate social distinctions based on color.

However little a percentage of his ancestry was black, it was that percentage that mattered. Despite Plessy’s white appearance, the state of Louisiana viewed him as black and treated him accordingly, illustrating the illogicality of racial lines and the laws created to guard them. This left individuals who, like Plessy, were visibly white, but by definition still black, to either accept their position in society as inferior or to escape such oppressive markers by passing for white.

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare’s father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare’s husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. At first glance, the title Passing appears to refer to the lifestyle that Clare has chosen. However, she decides early in the novel that she would like to rejoin black society and no longer cares for racial pretenses. Irene, who Clare has adopted as her guide into the black community, treats Clare with civility. Yet all the while, she is resentful of Clare’s cavalier attitude and wishes to prevent her reentry into the black community. In the novel, Irene’s identity will come into question, as she wears a particular visage for society while masking her true thoughts and feelings…

Purchase the thesis here.

Negro Genius—Reviewed work(s):

The Journal of American Folklore
Volume 18, Number 71 (October-December, 1905)
pages 319-322

NEGRO GENIUS. As a dispatch from Washington, D. C., the “Evening Transcript” (Boston, Mass.) of February 18, 1905, published the following concerning the investigations of Mr. Daniel Murray: –

“Daniel Murray, for many years an assistant in the Library of Congress, is preparing a historical review of the contributions of the colored race to the literature of the world, with a complete bibliography relating to that subject. Public attention was sharply called to this question of the intellectual capacity of the Negro six years ago by Booker T. Washington and other colored men of prominence, when the United States government was preparing an exhibit for the Exposition at Paris, 1900. Mr. Washington urged that advantage be taken of the opportunity to show what the colored race had contributed to the world’s literature. The authorities consenting, Mr. Putnam, librarian of Congress, detailed Mr. Murray to make a list of all books and pamphlets written and published by authors identified with the colored race. As only four months intervened from the detail to the opening, the list was far from complete and very deficient in full historical information which has now been supplied.

“Mr. Murray’s work was practically begun about twenty-five years ago, when he commenced to gather material for such a work after reading Grégoire’s ‘Inquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes and Mulattoes, Quadroons, etc.,’ 1810. Grégoire formed in 1790, in Paris, a society called ‘Friends of the Blacks,’ designed to secure their emancipation in the French colonies. Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were members. ‘One of the aims of this society,’ said Mr. Murray, ‘was to gather evidence of capacity on the part of Negroes and mulattoes, the same being designed to reinforce the argument the society intended to present to the French convention, to induce it to grant full equality to the mulattoes, etc., in the colonies. Benjamin Banneker, a mulatto, born in Maryland, to whom credit is due for saving to the American people L’Enfant’s original plan of the city of Washington when L’Enfant broke with the commissioners and took away his plans, which he later sold to Governor Woodward for laying out the city of Detroit, was an intimate friend of Jefferson’s and was often held up as evidence that no mulatto should be a slave. Banneker exhibited mathematical knowledge, and compiled in 1792 an almanac which Jefferson sent to the Anti-Slavery Society in Paris to support his view that the mulatto was the equal of the white man. Jefferson had high regard for Banneker and formally invited him to be his guest at Monticello, and in other ways treated him as an equal.

“‘In the same spirit animating Grégoire, and for the same purpose, to show to the world that the colored race, under which head I include all not white or who have a strain of African blood, is entitled to greater credit than is now accorded it by the American people, I have prosecuted my researches. I claim for the colored race whatever credit of an intellectual character a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon has won in the world of letters, and believe a fair examination of the evidence will remove no little prejudice against African blood. It has generally been accepted by scholars that ” Phillis Wheatley’s Poems,” 1773, was the first book by a Negro to display unusual intelligence and win recognition from the Caucasian. But this is not so. Beginning with Alexander the Great and his black general, Clitus, I have patiently gathered the facts from authentic sources of every highly creditable act by a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon in the forum of letters or the polite arts…

Read the entire article here.

Not keeping up appearances? Mixed race Asian Americans and the use of racial language

University of Utah
December 2009
76 pages

Paul Charles Humbert-Fisk

A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science

There has been a movement to proclaim that mixed race (biracial or multiracial) individuals transcend race or bring about an end to race and racism. In the U.S., many people also believe that they know race when they see it and that race can easily be pointed to, defined, and labeled. This language of race (which I am calling realist racial language) frames racial and ethnic identities as homogeneous, static, and as uncontested in terms of group membership. Many texts written by and about mixed race Asian Americans challenge both of these discourses about race. In this paper, I contend that the way race is commonly talked and written about is harmful to mixed race individuals. I examined the Pacific Citizen newspaper and the books What are you? and Part Asian: 100% Hapa for how mixed race Asian Americans narrate their experiences and contest, question, and subvert common sense notions of race. For many mixed race individuals, questions about race do not go away and instead race becomes pervasive in their lives. I use Foucault’s concept of surveillance to help understand the close scrutiny placed on mixed race individuals, through actions like asking “What are you?” I draw on Trinh Minh-ha’s approach by attempting to highlight and interrupt how “Truth” and validity are discursively created about race through the rules and regulations of (academic) disciplines. I believe that if teachers and scholars continue to rearticulate realist racial language in their discussions and analyses of race, they will continue to create problematic and deficit views of mixed race individuals.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
  • Research Question
• DEBATES IN CRT ON ANALYZING ISSUES OF RACE
  • Intricacies of Race and Representation
• LIMITATIONS OF REALIST RACIAL LANGUAGE
  • Positionality
• DISCOURSES AND SURVEILLANCE OF RACE
• METHODS
• INTERPRETING MIXED RACE TEXTS
  • Defensive Interruptions
  • Questioning Interruptions
  • Productive Interruptions
• DISCUSSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR CRT/LATCRIT
• REFERENCES

Read the entire thesis here.

Celtic Tiger, Hidden Dragon: exploring identity among second generation Chinese in Ireland

The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review
Volume 2, Issue 1 (Summer 2007)
pages 48-69

Nicola Yau, Independent Researcher

Through qualitative interviews, participant observation and an asynchronous group discussion on an Internet forum for second generation Chinese, this article explores identity among the second generation in ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. The Chinese, while being one of the largest minority ethnic groups, are almost invisible in other ways. This article examines how the second generation self-identify by analysing the theory of double consciousness, the significance of experiencing identity in contrast to a search for ‘authentic identities’ and the limitations of an Irish-only identity which questions what it really means to be Irish. The diasporic nature of identity is also explored through a ‘homing desire’ in terms of ties to China and Hong Kong, as is representation due to the changing nature of racialisation in Ireland following the recent arrival of ‘new’ Mainland Chinese immigrants and the addition of an ‘ethnic’ question to the 2006 Census form.

Introduction

Identity in the age of modernity is always in process, leading Stuart Hall (1996a) to pose the question: who needs ‘identity’? Whether we are migrants ourselves or products of migration, identity at home and away is vital in locating ourselves in the world. In the age of migration, identity gains greater saliency. In this article, I explore identity among second generation Chinese in ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. Identity formation has always played a significant part in my own life because my father is ethnic Chinese and I had often wondered who the other members of the second generation were and if they had similar experiences to my own. In my mind there was a ‘felt necessity’ (Stanley 1996: 48, original emphasis) to carry out this research because, while being one of the largest visible minority ethnic groups in Ireland, the Chinese are very much invisible in other ways. I believe it is also important to research self-identification among the second generation which will assist in understanding the wide variety of experiences making up the current ethnic diversity of the country.

I begin by looking at identity as a process, how the second generation self identify and how they feel they are perceived by mainstream Irish society. The diasporic nature of identity is explored through the idea of a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996), by examining ties to China and Hong Kong, and finally I use theories of home and belonging to look at how the second generation views Ireland and what it represents for them and their identities…

…When I asked my participants how they would describe their identity, answers varied depending on their own processes of identification. However, the sense of identification being a process, of becoming, of journeying was clear, for example, when Lucy said her identity was fragmented, fractured and belligerent. She explained this by saying:

Because you’re really on your own your parents aren’t really helping you out with that. I don’t think anyone can really help you out with that, you know what I mean…you kind of have to just, yeah, figure it out in your own head. It takes a few years…but then once you figure it out and are happy with what you figured out then it’s fine but up until that point it does give an awful amount of trouble.

It is clear that her identity was individual, that it was her journey and her sense of becoming. Identity to her was the process, not merely the label she chose to go by. It was only when I asked her how she would describe her national identity that she discussed labels, none of which she chose herself:

I think if you’re kind of half and half and in between I don’t know but maybe some people find it very easy in a country where there is a lot of other people like that, then it can be very easy to identify as being like say British or American, but in Ireland I don’t think you’re ever given the facility to do that. There just isn’t the, you know, there isn’t the acceptance here to do that; not that you need people’s acceptance but like that does have an influence on you, you know people’s reactions to you, so it doesn’t really mean that much, it’s a passport and it’s an accent and that’s about it. I think you can be yourself wherever you are, so you know you don’t have to be constantly identifying yourself as Irish to be like a person.

Lucy did not feel a particular affinity to being categorized as Irish. Her sense of becoming enveloped the process of identification as being a person of mixed-race origins. She highlighted the in-between nature of her identity and while her group of friends, all of whom are white Irish, would class her as Irish, she did not. Irish is an identity that is largely symbolic to her, which she reduces to an accent and a passport. Although she may be ethnically Irish and Chinese, she is racialised as Chinese which corresponds to Song’s (2003) statement that very often people are forcefully included in groups and attributed ethnic identities which are not the same as their own sense of identity…

…For those of mixed race origins there were additional elements in their identity processes. This was evident in how my participants reacted to me. When the issue of my visible Chineseness was raised, Ida drew attention to my dual heritage while Catherine, who is also of dual heritage, thought that I looked ‘obviously’ Chinese. This mirrors the idea that monoracial groups often question membership of mixed race people because they are not ‘fully’ of any one heritage (Song 2003). Therefore, self-perception and perception by others plays a significant role in identity formation. In the next section, I examine how the second generation feel they are perceived by mainstream Irish society…

…For some of my participants of mixed race origins the ethnicity question caused confusion. When discussing this with Jessica I asked her if she considered ticking the Other option, since it included those of a mixed race background. She came to the conclusion that:

I was going to tick it but then I thought well you know I do kind of identify as Chinese, so, and Asia is ok for me and it was a difficult one to fill in to be honest. It was the last question I filled in, in the whole census form because it doesn’t allow, I’m not a complicated background, race background and I had a dilemma of which of two to fill in.

Jessica’s decision to choose the Asian Irish option ahead of the Other category highlights her desire to stress both her identities, which the latter did not allow her to do. This reflects the opinions of Darryl Slater who is of dual heritage. He stresses his two ethnic identities, even though mainstream British society sees him only as Black. The mixed race lived experience adds a further dimension to the process of identification. As Song (2003) concludes, it is Slater’s experience of his parents and his family relationships, if nothing else, that is distinct from that of monoracial people.

This reflects Anderson’s (1991: 166) contention that ‘the fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions’. On the contrary, there is uncertainty and there are fractions. This sentiment was further conveyed by Lucy:

I think that people who are, you know, mixed race and Chinese and Irish or brought up Irish like, you kind of fall down between the cracks really because you can’t, because you’re asked to identify yourself with one particular group but it’s kind of hard to do it because culturally you might be but racially you’re not really, still you’re not seen as the same, so eh, which is a bit ridiculous really because it doesn’t really matter…that’s Ireland though because in America you wouldn’t have that because it’s all just everyone, whatever, loads of different people you know you can all end up being American although you can have your separate identity but in Ireland it seems you have to be Irish and that’s it and if you don’t fit white Irish then you’re not really Irish…

Read the entire article here.

The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition

Wasafiri
Volume 13, Issue 27
pages 5-10
DOI 10.1080/02690059808589583

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt confided to his diary his ambition to write a book. Its object would be ‘not so much the elevation of the colored people’—the concern of most late nineteenth century reformers, both white and black—‘as the elevation of the whites,’; for he considered it was ‘the unjust spirit of caste’, rather than the moral or economic or educational conditions of blacks which lay behind racial inequities in America. Chesnutt’s focus on white Americans as the problem would be accompanied by a particular methodology. He did not propose ‘a fierce indiscriminate onslaught; not an appeal to force, … (for) the subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans …, cannot be taken by assault’. Instead, ‘their [garrison) must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it’. This metaphor, of the secret operation which carries the writer silently into the enemy’s camp, is a peculiarly apt one for Chesnutt’s writing. His first book would not be published until 1899 but the two collections of stories which came out that year, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, were both as subtle and as determined to make his point as the image suggests. In those books too, and in a subsequent novel, The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt would often appear to be taking his stand on enemy ground and revisiting fictions which were themselves part of the problem. Chesnutt not only took white authors as his models but seemed at times to seek out genres particularly associated with that ‘feeling of repulsion toward the negro’ which he believed so prevalent.

In a sense Chesnutt’s literary tactics reflected his own anomalous position in a society obsessive about racial boundaries. The son of free North Carolina blacks, Chesnutt was probably also the grandson, on both sides, of white men. His appearance was pale enough to ‘pass‘ for white, though it was an option he rejected. Physically ‘white’ to the eyes of the unacquainted, culturally ‘white’ in his education and tastes, Chesnutt was nonetheless black historically; in the place he inherited in America’s rigidly stratified society. Chesnutt’s writing addressed his country’s racial inequality and its slave-owning history but formally it continued to resemble the ‘white’ tradition of writing on the subject…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Classification and History

Routledge
1997-02-01
376 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8153-2602-1

Edited by

E. Nathaniel Gates (1955-2006)
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

Explores the concept of “race”

The term “race,” which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of “races” as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of “race” and “racial” hierarchies in law, literature, and culture.

How “racial” categories facilitate social control

The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that “racial” categorization is a powerful social force that is often used to promote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on “race” have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups.

A multidisciplinary resource

This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source.

Table of Contents

• Volume Introduction
• The Crime of Color—Paul Finkelman
• Reflections on the Comparative History and Sociology of Racism—George M. Fredrickson
• The Italian, a Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890-1898—George E. Cunningham
• Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia—C. Fasseur
• Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship—Ian Haney Lopez
• The Prerequisite Cases—Ian Haney Lopez
• Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology—Alexander Saxton
• Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality—Alexander Saxton
• Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia—Ann Stoler
• Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States—David R. Roediger
• The Race Question and Liberalism: Casuistries in American Constitutional Law—Stanford M. Lyman
• Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness—David R. Roediger
• Acknowledgments

In My Experience: A Multi-Racial Heritage

Forum: with Michael Kransy
KQED Radio
San Francisco, California
2011-12-16

Dave Iverson, Host

As part of our series “In My Experience,” spotlighting the personal stories of our listeners, we talk with a panel of biracial and multi-racial people about race, identity and what it’s like to grow up looking different from your neighbors and even your parents. We listen to their stories, and we welcome yours.

Download the episode (00:51:58) here.

Boucicault’s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

Atlantic Studies
Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009)
pages 81-95
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802696287

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault’s advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault’s play, Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault’s close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed.

Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach’s influential study of what he called the ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ made The Octoroon a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in ‘‘the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic’’, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody also drew on the play in her study of the ‘‘mulatta’’ in nineteenth-century British/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks examines it as a transatlantic ‘‘spectacle of race.’’ The play’s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written ‘‘after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry’’ (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black…

…This article examines Boucicault’s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault’s source for the play, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel The Quadroon. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault’s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault’s focus is very different from Reid’s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid’s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the ‘‘Irish dramas,’’ The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault’s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play’s exploration of the social implications of the ‘‘Octoroon’s’’ mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Negro Defined

The Yale Law Journal
Volume 20, Number 3 (January, 1911)
pages 224-225

In many of the states where a considerable portion of the population is colored, statutes define the term negro and establish his status where the same is considered, because of local conditions, as essentially different from that of Caucasians. Where legislatures have either negligently or intentionally left the terms “negro” and “colored” undefined, courts have faced difficulty in reaching exact decisions on the point of just what proportion of negro blood in a person of mixed racial descent will constitute him or her a “negro” or “colored.” The question is purely academic, and its settlement lies largely in the discretion of the court, in combining technical definitions of ethnological experts and accepted public opinion on the subject.

In the recent case of State of Louisiana v. Treadway, 52 So., 500, an exhaustive review of statutory and judicial law resulted in a divided court on the question in issue. Here the defendant, a male octoroon, was indicted, charged with having lived in concubinage with a female member of the Caucasian race. The statute governing the alleged offense made criminal, concubinage between members of the Caucasian race and members of the negro or black race.

The decision hinged on the question in issue: “Was an octoroon a member of the negro or black race?” The court decided, three to two, that the defendant, an octoroon, was not a negro within the meaning of the statute…

Read the entire article here.