Mixed Race Studies

Passing as White: The Life Altering Effects on Loved Ones

Southern Connecticut State University
May 2006
122 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1435422
ISBN: 9780542641824

Kathleen Daubney

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Science

This thesis analyzes the theme of passing in Harlem Renaissance literature and deals with the consequences that such transitions to white society had on the passers’ friends and relatives. Choices that one person makes can have a domino and long lasting effect on his or her family and friends. This study focuses on: Passing by Nella Larsen, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson, “Passing,” by Langston Hughes, and Comedy: American Style and Plum Bun both by Jessie Fauset. This thesis discusses if the family and friends have knowledge of the passing, if they had a voice in the novel, and if the children had knowledge of their heritage. It also discusses the effects passing had on the families and friends of the passers, along with their responses.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PASSING AS WHITE: THE LIFE ALTERING EFFECTS ON LOVED ONES
• FAUSET’S PLUM BUN: PASSING AND RETURNING
• LARSEN’S PASSING: ESCAPE, WEALTH, OR APPEARANCE
• THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN: WHITE, BLACK, WHITE?
• HUGHES “PASSING”: I LOVE YOU, BUT
• COMEDY AMERICAN STYLE: OLIVIA’S PASSING, THE FAMILY’S ESCAPE
• CONCLUSION: TO PASS OR NOT TO PASS
• REFERENCES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture

Oxford University Press
May 1997
356 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780195134186; ISBN10: 0195134184

Susan Gubar, Distinguished Professor Emerita and Ruth N. Halls Professor Emerita of English
Indiana University

When the actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a 1993 Friars Club roast, he ignited a firestorm of protest that landed him on the front pages of the newspapers, rebuked by everyone from talk show host Montel Williams to New York City’s then mayor, David Dinkins. Danson’s use of blackface was shocking, but was the furious pitch of the response a triumphant indication of how far society has progressed since the days when blackface performers were the toast of vaudeville, or was it also an uncomfortable reminder of how deep the chasm still is separating black and white America?

In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women’s literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy–cross-racial impersonations or “racechanges”—throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of “mainstream” artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating “racechanges” Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks “passing” for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability.

Drawing on a stunning array of illustrations, including paintings, film stills, computer graphics, and even magazine morphings, Racechanges sheds new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism and exciting aesthetic possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.

Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora

University of California Press
May 2009
296 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520255340
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520255326
PDF E-Book ISBN: ISBN: 9780520943469

Sarah Gualtieri, Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

This multifaceted study of Syrian immigration to the United States places Syrians—and Arabs more generally—at the center of discussions about race and racial formation from which they have long been marginalized. Between Arab and White focuses on the first wave of Arab immigration and settlement in the United States in the years before World War II, but also continues the story up to the present. It presents an original analysis of the ways in which people mainly from current day Lebanon and Syria—the largest group of Arabic-speaking immigrants before World War II—came to view themselves in racial terms and position themselves within racial hierarchies as part of a broader process of ethnic identity formation.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terms and Transliterations
• Introduction
• 1. From Internal to International Migration
• 2. Claiming Whiteness: Syrians and Naturalization Law
• 3. Nation and Migration: Emergent Arabism and Diasporic Nationalism
• 4. The Lynching of Nola Romey: Syrian Racial Inbetweenness in the Jim Crow South
• 5. Marriage and Respectability in the Era of Immigration Restriction
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Becoming Arab American
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

When it comes to race and ethnicity in America, it can all get very complicated depending on who is defining whom, and why. People are not always what they appear to be. People are sometimes not what they want to be. In reality, race is as much a matter of politics as biology; ethnicity as much an expression of fashion as fate. It can be transient, changing from time to time and place to place.

Jonathan Tilove, “Of Susie Guillory Phipps and Chief Redbone: The Mutability of Race,” Newhouse News Service, (July 9, 1992). http://jonathantilove.com/mutability-of-race/

“Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!”

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-09-01

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

My niece recently had a baby, a beautiful boy. The proud grandmother showed the photo of the newborn to family members and everyone oohed and aahed. One of his cousins looked at the picture and said, “Oh he’s so cute!”  But suddenly a puzzled look came over him and he blurted out, “Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!
 
When I heard this story I thought, Oh, it’s already started. People see colors and label according to what they see. The little cousin saw white and labeled the baby white. But mom is Japanese as well as Irish and Scottish. Dad is Irish as well as African American and American Indian. The baby is therefore all of these. But he is already being labeled by a single category, a race.
 
And he is already being looked at in relation to his family. The little cousin was intrigued  because to him mom is probably white and dad black, so put black and white together and what do you get? A white baby?…

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Mom’s Hapa Cubs

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-05-09

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Are persons with one Asian parent and one non-Asian parent Asian or not Asian? Schools don’t seem to know where to place them, leaving them on their own to determine their identities. In the article, “Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’,” some young Hapa reveal the ambivalence and flexibility surrounding their identities. Parents wondering if they should regard their kids as Asian might take a lesson from Tiger Mom Amy Chua, who raised two Hapa children.

Amy describes her two girls, Sophia and Lulu, as having “brown hair, brown eyes, and Asianesque features.” They both speak Chinese and Sophia eats “all kind of organs and organisms, duck webs, pig ears, and sea slugs, critical aspects of Chinese identity.” Yet, on their first trip to China, the girls are treated as spectacles, drawing curious crowds, even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, when people stared, giggled, and pointed at the “two little foreigners who speak Chinese.” At the zoo, when the girls were taking pictures of the baby pandas, the crowd was taking pictures of the girls…

Read the entire article here.

Stonequist’s Concept of “The Marginal Man” in Langston Hughes’ Play Mulatto

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature
ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online)
Volume 1, Number 4 (September 2012)
pages 125-130

Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand
University of Tehran, Iran

Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Assistant Professor of Letters and Humanities
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

Born with the inception of the slave trade, interracial mixing has always been a moot point throughout the history of the United States. In America’s racist climate, the mulatto offspring of every interracial relationship was deemed by the dominant white society to be born of transgression and thus was marginalized and disenfranchised as an alleged tainter of white “pure blood” and a threat to the societal system of structural positions. Facing discrimination and injustice like black Americans, white-black mulattoes also suffered from not belonging to a definite racial group. This duality of a mixed-blood’s life has grabbed the attention of many scholars including Everett Verner Stonequist who discussed the fragile subalternized status of the “marginal man” in an antagonistic environment while he rejects and craves for both of his racial ancestries at the same time. Envisioning a three-phase life-cycle for a mulatto, Stonequist maintained that the mulatto has either to conform to the status quo and survive or defy the power structures and embrace, mostly unfavorable, consequences. This paper aims to apply Stonequist’s concept of “marginal man” to Langston Hughes’ play Mulatto (1935) and tries to show how the alienated and rootless protagonist is inevitably precipitated into death and destruction.

Read the entire article here.

Race and a Political Race

Everyday Sociology Blog
2012-09-28

Jonathan R. Wynn, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dwanna L. Robertson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Massachusetts Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of racialized language (reminiscent of the 2008 Presidential campaign) seeped in. This actually started in April, when Brown’s staffers uncovered that Warren claimed she was a minority, implicating her as committing ethnic fraud because she lacked proof of a Native American ancestry.
 
During their first political debate, Brown went straight at this issue in a prepared remark, saying, “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color—And as you can see, she’s not.” With this statement, Brown contends he can identify Native Americans—and other people of color—just by looking at them.

It would be humorous—Did she accidentally forget to braid her hair and wear her moccasins?—if it didn’t have serious undertones cutting at the heart of race and politics in the U.S.. Brown suggests Warren received special consideration for claiming she was part Cherokee. “When you are a U.S. Senator,” he stated, “you have to pass a test and that’s one of character and honesty and truthfulness. I believe and others believe she’s failed that test.” But did Warren fail the test?…

..Back to Brown’s assertion idea that our eyes can tell us a person’s race. Sociologist Mary Campbell has been working on misclassification of race based upon skin tone, finding not only that American Indians experience a high level of misidentification, but that in the process they also experience higher levels of psychological distress…

There is, however, a real challenge when it comes to speaking of how indigenous folk look. It is not just that it’s a bad idea to think facial features are satisfactory markers of race. It is that the emphasis on perception also indicates a complete misunderstanding of U.S. History: People who claim First Nation Heritage are of a mixed ethnic background due to generations of attempted racial extermination, cultural oppression, and a breaking of tribal links to land and community…

Read the entire article here.

Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family and the Pacific War

University of Hawai‘i Press (Distributed for the National University of Singapore Press)
2011
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-9971-69-573-6

Rebecca Kenneison

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, ‘only told what Reggie wanted you to know.’ Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren’t noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it’s about what Reggie didn’t tell me.

So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. Reggie was the author’s father, and one of the many gaps in his account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world.

Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this book recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but during the Pacific War they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and worse. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great eloquence and clarity.

That’s How It Goes: Autobiography Of A Singapore Eurasian

Select Books
2008
235 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9789814022392

F. A. C. “Jock” Oehlers

These memoirs by a member of one of Singapore’s leading Eurasian families offers many sidelights onto Singapore’s life in the mid-20th century. The author, then a dental student, tells of the hardships of his life with a young family at the Japanese-enforced agricultural settlement for Eurasians at Bahau, Negri Sembilan. He tells of his career as an oral surgeon at the University and in private practice, his involvement with the development of the Singapore Kennel Club until his 1990 retirement to Perth, West Australia. With black-and-white photographs.