Mixed Race Studies

Passing for Black in Seventeenth-Century Maryland

Chapter in:

Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives
Springer
2011
246 pages
eBook ISBN: 978-0-387-70759-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-387-70758-7
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4614-2709-4

Edited by: Mary C. Beaudry and James Symonds

Chapter Authors:

Julia A. King, Associate Professor of Anthropology
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Edward E. Chaney

In the Chesapeake region of the United States, archaeologists (including ourselves) typically organize the men and women who made up colonial society into one of three categories: European, African, or Native American. Although these three categories at one time were conflated with skin color, today, they are conceived primarily (although not always) in terms of ancestry or origin. Archaeologists have used these categories to document and interpret social life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to understand the nature and origins of altitudes toward difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. The best of this work has revealed a range of responses to post-Contact life in the region. Enslaved Africans, for example, were able to use material culture to exert some control over their material and spiritual lives. Many Chesapeake Bay Indians maintained traditional practices long after the arrival of English men and women, while others did not. Meanwhile. English men and women were doing their damndest to transplant English ways of life to the region, usually, but not always, with considerable success.

Indeed, the use of the terms European, African, and Indian to frame Chesapeake history has often served as a counterbalance to the work of the region’s very productive social history school, which focused the majority of its scholarly attention on the experiences of the English colonists who made their way to Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century. This work, which has contributed enormously to Chesapeake historiography, has, with some important exceptions, had the unintentional effect of displacing and even erasing the indigenous and African people who were also a part of this history. Putting Native Americans and Africans back into the landscape was a necessary corrective to what was then shaping up to be a wholly European story. The cure, however, while not worse than the disease, raises its own issues concerning the study of racial and ethnic difference. European, African, and Indian have become fixed, unchanging, a priori categories of identity, givens rather than problems for study. Not only do the categories mask considerable variability, they ignore how these identities themselves came to be constructed, and how these identities, then and now. subtly reinforce colonial hierarchies through the use of imposed identities (sec Epperson. 1999 for an early critique).

That such assumptions about race and ethnicity continue to influence the direction of Chesapeake studies is illustrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s recently opened (2009) exhibit. Written in Hone: Forensic Files from the 17th Century. The exhibit’s curators use morphological and metrical measurements collected from Chesapeake skeletons to conclude that “only three groups … were here in the 1600s and early 1700s—individuals of Native American. European, and African origins” (Smithsonian Institution, 2009). The exhibit goes on to list the biological attributes of these “origins” and then quite seamlessly link these attributes to culturally specilied groups. As historian Ken Cohen has pointed out in his review of the Smithsonian’s exhibit for the Journal of American History (2009), such determinations and linkages conflate origin and identity, imposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century racial categories on past groups and. in so doing, “[erasing] multi-racial individuals and cultural adaptations such as ‘passing.'” Cohen concludes that, for the exhibit’s visitors, “the oversimplified treatment of race [will prevent them] from understanding the dynamic experience of the seventeenth-century moment when modern definitions of race were forming but not yet crystallized.”

Cohen’s point is especially well-taken for the seventeenth-century period, when racial categories of identity were not nearly as fixed as they would become in the eighteenth century. And, even in the eightteenlh century, while these imposed categories became increasingly “real” in a social sense, we still have trouble showing how people in this period constructed their own identity. Studies of race and ethnicity in other places have revealed the role of material culture in identity formation. Yet, surprisingly few archaeological studies of the construction of racial categories have been undertaken for the Chesapeake region’s first century of colonization. In Maryland, this is largely because, or at least the argument goes, Africans constituted a small minority of the population through the end of the century. Given the profound influence of the social history school on Chesapeake historiography and its emphasis on a quantitative approach, this argument is not unexpected. The argument is unpersuasive, however, given that the indigenous population, especially in the first century of sustained contact, hardly constituted a minority, and few studies have focused on the emergence of the category Indian in the seventeenth century (but see Potter. 1993).

An important exception is Alison Bell’s (2005) study of white ethnogenesis in the colonial Chesapeake. Using patterns in Chesapeake domestic architecture first identified by Cary Carson (Carson et al.. 1981). James Deetz (1993. 1996). Henry Glassie (1975), and Dell Upton (1982, 1986), Bell concluded that changes in the construction and layout of Chesapeake dwellings through time revealed one strategy by which Anglo-Americans (her term) were able to reconfigure themselves as a new social category they called “white.” As Chesapeake planters began building houses distancing themselves from the men and women who labored on their farms, they continued to use technologies and building designs that required planters to rely on other planters (and “whites”) in a kind of traditional network lo help maintain those houses. Racism, Bell (2005:457) concluded, “slowed the development of capitalism…

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Although mixed marriages, and mixed racial identities, are also rising rapidly in the United States, they are still infrequent by British standards: around 10% of African Americans are in mixed marriages, compared to “over 25%” for black Caribbean Britons and “over 40%” for British born black Caribbeans. Traditionally, American racial identity has been defined by the “one drop” rule: those with any black heritage are seen by others—and come to see themselves—as black. Some of America’s most prominent black figures fit this pattern: both Barack Obama and Colin Powell are children of mixed relationships between a black immigrant husband and a white American wife. Both have defined themselves as black, and married black partners. This may be changing—self-identification as mixed is rising in the United States, whose Census bureau also now officially acknowledges it—but contrary to popular perceptions America lags behind Britain in rates of mixing and, arguably, in acknowledging and discussing mixed identity.

Rob Ford, “The melting pot generation: How Britain became more relaxed on race,” Brisith Future, (December 12, 2012): 6. http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-melting-pot-generation.pdf.

Leading academics say there are some signs that Britain is the real melting pot these days, with people from ethnic minorities far more likely to marry someone from the white majority than in the US, and Britons far more comfortable calling themselves mixed-race than they would be in the United States.

Rachael Jolley, “The melting pot generation: How Britain became more relaxed on race,” Brisith Future, (December 12, 2012): 8. http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-melting-pot-generation.pdf.

Staged Bodies: Passing, Performance, and Masquerade in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
pages 69-91
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0062

Margaret Toth, Assistant Professor of English
Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that “one of the ironies” of the New Negro Movement “is that words, not the tactics of visual representation, were the tools blacks used to assert their self-image” (xliv). While we can point to exceptions that complicate this observation—James Van Der Zee’s photography, Archibald Motley’s paintings, or W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographic collection Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U. S. A. (1900)—Gates identifies an important gap in the history of African American self-imaging. What happens, however, when we open up Gates’s terms to examine how authors using words might simultaneously employ “tactics of visual representation”? These written and visual representational modes are not easily or neatly separated. In fact, early African American literature regularly combined them. The first African American novelists creatively integrated these methods of representation in their texts, strategically dismantling racist visual iconography by developing an ocular language that invited consumers of their fiction not just to read their words but also to see the images those words conjured. This practice became even more prevalent during the New Negro Movement, particularly in passing novels that sought to embody mixed-race characters for socio-political purposes. This essay thus revises Gates’s claim that “until the 1920s there was virtually no black counterpoint to the hegemony of racist visual images that dominated the popular arts and more subtly infiltrated the fine arts” (xliv). Authors of the written word were developing a specific language, a visual discourse that sought to topple the hegemony Gates describes.

Visual discourse builds on the practice of “word painting” that dominated US realist writing by the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Wharton identifies word painting as highly descriptive language that “help[s] to make [a character] bodily visible” (485). While not the only tool available for “conferring visibility” to “the reader’s mind” (484), the artist’s brush, when applied to the written page, aided realists who sought to convey an “acute visibility which makes the [reader’s] heart throb and the marrow tingle at the flesh-and-blood aliveness” of literary characters (481). Word painting facilitates the textual or readerly gaze; it encourages the reader to picture or see a character.

Authors deploying visual discourse certainly rely on evocative word painting, but they push beyond descriptive language into a more complex discursive register. They emphasize ocularity by consciously staging their descriptions. For example, when William Wells Brown provides his first portrait of the eponymous heroine in Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter (1853)—describing her creamy skin, “her long black wavy hair done up in the neatest manner; her form tall and graceful” (47)—he embeds it within a framework that underscores the act of looking. Specifically, Clotel is on the auction block, being inspected by a crowd of potential buyers. In this passage, which the narrator explicitly refers to as a “scene” (48), the straightforward description of Clotel, or what Wharton calls the “vivid picturing” (485) of a character, functions within a layered linguistic system that both relies on and foregrounds the mediated gaze. Fictional characters within the novel look at Clotel, and readers look along with them.

Moreover, authors exploiting visual discourse often allude to—and sometimes rework the codes of—traditional visual and performing arts such as painting and theater, photography, and, by the early twentieth century, silent film. Another early text, Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste; Or The Slave Bride (1865), provides an informative illustration of how this practice functions to generate the textual gaze. In the ekphrastic veiled portrait scenes of the novel, readers behold Richard rendered as art: his haunting face dominates the vivid oil painting, which appears “lifelike and breathing” (57). At the same time, readers are compelled to see the similarities between Richard and his mixed-race daughter Claire, who gazes at the image’s “dark, noble beauty, with quivering lips and flushed cheeks”; as the narrator puts it, the “two…

Dr. Yaba Blay Explores ‘One-Drop’ Rule [VIDEO]

NewsOne: For Black America
2012-12-14

Jeff Mays

Remember when President Barack Obama won in 2008 and pundits started asking if the United States was post-racial because we had a Black man in the White House?
 
Well, people like Dr. Yaba Blay (pictured) knew better.
 
Blay, an assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University, explores Black racial identity and the politics of skin color with her creative and thought-provoking (1)ne Drop project.
 
The one-drop rule refers to the centuries-old rule that deemed anyone with any sort of African heritage to be Black, even if you are of mixed heritage. It’s the idea that one drop of Black blood makes you Black. The rule is still alive and well today, which has been discussed by people of mixed heritage like Obama and Halle Berry.
 
And it’s an issue we play out with one another. Four hundred years after Blacks were first brought to this country as slaves, it wasn’t uncommon for African Americans to discriminate against one another based on the color of their complexions. Just look at the complexions of women considered to be attractive in the media productions of African Americans. How many of our politicians are dark-skinned?
 
“Many of us would like to believe that we have a Black President and it’s how many years since enslavement and that we’ve come a long way and these things don’t matter,” said Blay…

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Demographic, residential, and socioeconomic effects on the distribution of nineteenth-century African-American stature

Journal of Population Economics
Volume 24, Issue 4 (October 2011)
pages 1471-1491
DOI: 10.1007/s00148-010-0324-x

Scott Alan Carson, Professor of Economics
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin

Nineteenth-century mulattos were taller than their darker-colored African-American counterparts. However, traditional explanations that attribute the mulatto stature advantage to only socioeconomic factors are yet to tie taller mulatto statures to observable phenomenon. Vitamin D production may also explain part of the nineteenth-century mulatto–black stature differential. Mulattos were taller than darker-pigmented blacks across the stature distribution, and higher melanin concentrations in darker black stratum corneums reduced the amount of vitamin D synthesized. The interaction with sunlight in darker-complexioned blacks was associated with larger stature returns for darker-complexioned blacks than their mulatto counterparts.

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Association of Contextual Factors with Drug Use and Binge Drinking among White, Native American, and Mixed-Race Adolescents in the General Population

Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Volume 41, Issue 11 (November 2012)
pages 1426-1441
DOI: 10.1007/s10964-012-9789-0

Hsing-Jung Chen
Department of Social Work
Fu-Jen Catholic University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

Sundari Balan, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Psychiatry
Washington University in St. Louis

Rumi Kato Price, Research Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Washington University in St. Louis

Large-scale surveys have shown elevated risk for many indicators of substance abuse among Native American and Mixed-Race adolescents compared to other minority groups in the United States. This study examined underlying contextual factors associated with substance abuse among a nationally representative sample of White, Native American, and Mixed-Race adolescents 12–17 years of age, using combined datasets from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH 2006–2009, N = 46,675, 48.77% female). Native American adolescents displayed the highest rate of past-month binge drinking and past-year illicit drug use (14.06 and 30.91%, respectively). Results of a logistic regression that included seven predictors of social bonding, individual views of substance use, and delinquent peer affiliations showed that friendships with delinquent peers and negative views of substance use were associated significantly with both substance abuse outcomes among White and Mixed-Race adolescents and, to a lesser extent, Native American adolescents. The association of parental disapproval with binge drinking was stronger for White than for Native American adolescents. Greater attention to specific measures reflecting racial groups’ contextual and historical differences may be needed to delineate mechanisms that discourage substance abuse among at-risk minority adolescent populations.

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The Life Narrative of a Mixed-Race Man in Recovery from Addiction: A Case-Based Psychosocial Approach to Researching Drugs, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity

Journal of Social Work Practice: Psychotherapeutic Approaches in Health, Welfare and the Community
Published online: 2012-12-06
DOI: 10.1080/02650533.2012.745841

Alastair Roy, Senior Lecturer
Psychosocial Research Unit, School of Social Work
University of Central Lancashire

This paper explores the use of a psychosocial approach to researching drugs, race and ethnicity. It produces an analysis of interviews with Bobby, a mixed-race man in recovery from addiction. Sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives are brought to bear on the data in order to consider the character of Bobby’s opportunities, identifications, crises and resolutions. Despite the affective components of the wider discourse on drugs and race, the majority of previous research on the subject has focused on the production of rational explanations produced within objectivist epistemological frames. In contrast, the methods used in this project seek an explicit engagement with the irrational and unconscious aspects of researching these subjects. The paper concludes by reflecting on the value of psychosocially oriented narrative methods in this field.

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So while it is important to understand self-identification in thinking about race and ethnicity, people cannot simply choose an identity of their own making, nor can they escape the views and prejudices in others in navigating the world.

Dr. Omar Khan, “Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK,” Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain, (December 11, 2012). http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/188/359/Who-are-we-Census-2011-reports-on-ethnicity-in-the-UK.html

That Barack Obama self-identifies as African American rather than ‘Mixed’ has probably little to do with a rejection of his mother’s heritage or a radical kind of separatist politics. Rather, Obama’s identity is informed by his social experience, and the reality of racism is evidenced not simply in his experiences in the 1970s or 1980s, but in the continued focus on his place of birth and by the fact that over 90% of White American voters in Mississippi and Alabama voted for his opponent.

Dr. Omar Khan, “Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK,” Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain, (December 11, 2012). http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/188/359/Who-are-we-Census-2011-reports-on-ethnicity-in-the-UK.html