Mixed Race Studies

Slaves In The Family with Edward Ball

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-05-16, 21:00-22:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-05-17, 01:00-02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Edward Ball, Lecturer in English
Yale University

If you knew that you were a descendant of a slave- owner, would you tell anyone?

If you had an opportunity to apologize to descendants of those enslaved by your family, would you?

Edward Ball is a writer of narrative nonfiction and the author of five books, including The Inventor and the Tycoon (Doubleday, 2013), about the birth of moving pictures. The book tells the story of Edward Muybridge, the pioneering 19-century photographer (and admitted murderer), and Leland Stanford, the Western railroad baron, whose partnership, in California during the 1870s, gave rise to the visual media.

Edward Ball’s first book, Slaves in the Family (1998), told the story of his family’s history as slave-owners in South Carolina, and of the families they once enslaved. Slaves in the Family won the National Book Award for nonfiction, was a New York Times bestseller, was translated into five languages, and was featured on Oprah.

Edward Ball was born in Savannah, raised in Louisiana and South Carolina, and graduated from Brown University in 1982. He worked for ten years as freelance journalist in New York, writing about art and film, and becoming a columnist for The Village Voice.

His other books, all nonfiction, include The Sweet Hell Inside (2001), the story of an African-American family that rose from the ashes of the Civil War to build lives in music and in art during the Jazz Age; Peninsula of Lies (2004), the story of English writer Gordon Hall, who underwent one of the first sex reassignments—in the South during the 1960s—creating an outrage; and The Genetic Strand, about the process of using DNA to investigate family history.

Edward Ball lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories

Lexington Herald-Leader
Lexington, Kentucky
2011-05-15

Linda B. Blackford

Freda Spencer Goble of Paintsville knew that she hailed from a proud and hardworking clan that carved a life out of the hills and hollows of frontier Johnson County. What she didn’t know was that one of those frontiersmen, her great-great grandfather, was partly black.

William LaBach is a Georgetown lawyer and genealogist who has long studied his Gibson relatives, a clan of Louisiana sugar planters who made a second home in Lexington before the Civil War. He’d heard that a colonial forebear was part African, but could never confirm it.

These two Kentucky families are now the subject of a new book by Vanderbilt University law professor Daniel Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White reveals the complex and shifting history of race in America, a history about people’s most basic — and yet most unreliable — assumptions about their own identity…

…Thanks to books like Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball and revelations about President Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants, people have become more used to the idea that family trees branch with different ethnicities. However, the idea they might be a different ethnicity themselves is a new idea that is only recently emerging in genealogy and other historical studies.

“This is a more unsettling story. … The story really changes the way people approach race,” Sharfstein said. “For a lot of the descendants I spoke with, being white meant they really didn’t have to think about race for most of their lives. But now they’re really paying attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Cornel West: ‘They say I’m un-American’

The Guardian
2013-05-12

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

The American academic and firebrand campaigner talks about Britain’s deep trouble, fighting white supremacy and where Obama is going wrong

Cornel West, the firebrand of American academia for almost 30 years, is causing his hosts some problems. They are on a schedule but such things barely move him, for as he saunters down the high street there are people to talk to, and no one can leave shortchanged. Everyone, “brother” or “sister”, is indeed treated like a long lost family member. And then there is the hug; a bear-like pincer movement. There’s no escape. It happens in New York, where the professor/philosopher usually holds court. And now it’s the same in Cambridge.

The best students accord their visitors a healthy respect, but West’s week laying bare the conflicts and fissures of race and culture and activism and literature in the US and Britain yielded more than that during his short residency at King’s College. There are academics who draw a crowd, but the West phenomenon at King’s had rock star quality: the buzz, the poster beaming his image from doors and noticeboards; the back story – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, his seminal work Race Matters, his falling-in and falling-out with Barack Obama.

Others can teach, and at Cambridge the teaching is some of the best in the world, but standing-room-only crowds came to see West perform. He performed. Approaching 60 now, he is slow of gait. But he always performs…

Read the entire article here.

A Statistical Octoroon

Los Angeles Herald
Volume XXIX, Number 2 (1901-10-03)
page 4, columns 6-7
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

The Average American Seven Parts White and One Part Colored

The average adult American is a statistical octoroon, says Dr. Henry Gannett In Everybody’s Magazine. If the blood in the veins of all our of people, white and black, were pooled and redistributed, each person would have about seven parts white and one part negro blood. The white strain in him, moreover, is by no means purely American White strains of foreign origin, derived from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain and the countries of southern Europe, are collectively more powerful in his composition than is the negro strain. Thus going back only one generation, we find him to be a composite, the creation of widely differing bloods and nationalities. The peoples of the earth, from the Congo under the equator to the North Cape of Europe, have contributed, either immediately or remotely, to his composition. But with it all we find the Anglo-Saxon strain the dominant one. His political Institutions, his laws, his social conditions and his mental characteristics, his power of Initiative, and his independence of thought and action are Anglo-Saxon, sharpened and intensified by fresh contact with nature under new and untried conditions. It is a strange and a gratifying thing to witness, in connection with this mixture, of blood, the complete dominance of the Anglo-Saxon strain, and it argues well for its strength and vitality, an well as for the welfare of the country which he occupies and governs.

The Gil Gross Program with Marcia Dawkins

The Gil Gross Program
Talk 910, KKSF AM
San Francisco, California
Monday, 2013-05-13

Gil Gross, Host

Gil speaks with Marcia Dawkins, author of “Clearly Invisible; Racial passing and the Color of Cultural Identity“, about the growth of our mulit-racial nation.

Download the audio here.

Parallel Adele

Third World Newsreel
2008
Color
16 minutes
USA
English

Adele Pham, Director/Producer

Two half Vietnamese documentary filmmakers, both named Adele, weave a shared narrative of mixed Asian (hapa) experiences through interviews with 7 other mixed race subjects. History, memory, and anecdotes on multiracial ethnicity are represented through archival images, super 8 film, verité, and interview.

Screenings

• Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2009
• San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, 2009
• Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2008
• Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, 2008
• Slant: Bold Asian American Images, 2008

First Person: ‘We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester’

This is Leicestershire
Leicester Mercury
2013-03-27

Ben Ravilious

I was delighted to learn the city mayor has given the green light to Leicester’s City of Culture bid. However, I already have nagging doubts about the direction this might be taking.

It’s the flogging of the word “diversity” that concerns me. We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester but I think we should place more emphasis on the ways in which we mix to give us the best chance of winning.

Let’s be clear, my wife is of a different race, religion and nationality to me, we have two mixed-race daughters and my life is far richer as a result.

I also think it’s essential to continue the battle for equality so everyone in Leicester can all feel equally represented and respected.

But diversity alone is just a statistic and having diversity doesn’t necessarily mean harmony or cultural significance. It’s what we do with it that counts…

Read the entire article here.

Census 2011: Leicester ‘most ethnically diverse’ in region

BBC News
2012-12-11

Leicester is one of the most diverse cities in the UK and the largest in the East Midlands, the latest census shows.

Information from the 2011 survey shows there are 329,000 people living in the city, 24,000 more than in Nottingham, while 250,000 live in Derby. [See Leicester details here.]

Half of Leicester’s population describe themselves as white British, compared with 80% nationally and 63.9% in 2001.

Deputy Mayor of Leicester Rory Palmer said they viewed its diversity as a major strength.

The details emerged in the latest round of information released from the 2011 census taken in March.
 
Leicester was widely tipped to be the first city with a minority white population but just missed out on the landmark with 50.6% describing themselves as white.

But it does have one of the lowest rates of residents who identify themselves as white British, at 45%, and the highest proportion of British Indians, at 28.3%…

Mr. Palmer, deputy city mayor, said: “What it means is that we have a very diverse population and we view this as a great strength and something the city can be very proud of.

“We saw the Queen and the royal family kick off their Diamond Jubilee in March this year here in Leicester, probably because Leicester is a very real reflection of modern, vibrant, multi-cultural Britain.”

While Nottingham’s population remains smaller than Leicester’s at 305,680 – 38,692 more than in 2001 – it does have a higher than average mixed race community.

About 6% are mixed ethnicity, with 4% white and black Caribbean…

Read the entire article here.

It has been estimated that the census of 1860 will exhibit a total population in the United States of 81,500,000 souls, of whom 27,000,000 are whites. “To be apportioned on this population,” writes a statistician, “are two hundred and thirty-three representatives. Of this number, it is estimated, the Southern States will have eighty-two, being a decrease of seven; the Middle States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware will have fifty-nine, being a decrease of five; New England will have twenty-five, being a decrease of four; while the Western States will have sixty-seven. being an increase of fourteen.”

“Are You Ready for the Census?,” Sacramento Daily Union, (Volume 19, Number 2862, May 29, 1860). page 1, column 4. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&cl=search&d=SDU18600529.2.2&srpos=12. (Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection).

Internal migration and ethnic division: the case of Palmas, Brazil

The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Volume 22, Issue 2, August 2011
pages 203–219
DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00134.x

Mieke Schrooten
Anthropology Department
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven

Starting from the observation that Brazilian history has led to the development of a very distinct system of race relations, this paper focuses on the (re)creation of ethnic divisions in a new city, Palmas, the capital of the Brazilian state Tocantins. Because the city was only founded in 1990, internal migration has heavily influenced the composition of the city’s population. The research shows that residential proximity and interaction between whites and non-whites is largely limited to the poor neighbourhoods of the city. Subtle racism continues to exist, deriving from a way of thinking that naturalises the racial hierarchy. The absence of clearly defined racial categories and the centrality of miscegenation to the Brazilian identity complicate the further dismantling of this racist culture.

Read or purchase the article here.