It showed that the mixture of African Americans and Whites simply yielded children with some characteristics of each race, who were entirely normal.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2012-04-02 21:15Z by Steven

In 1932, under the supervision of Harvard physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, [Caroline Bond] Day published her Radcliffe master’s thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States. It showed that the mixture of African Americans and Whites simply yielded children with some characteristics of each race, who were entirely normal. In fact, Day observed, these offspring were often middle-class and lived lives that were very like those of middle-class White people, although in U.S. culture they were regarded as African American. As an outsider within her field, Day adapted the methods of anthropology to her own uses.

Anastasia C. Curwood, “Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology,” Transforming Anthropology, Volume 20, Issue 1, (April 2012): 79.

Tags: , ,

Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2012-03-19 01:00Z by Steven

Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 20, Issue 1, April 2012
pages 79–89
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01145.x

Anastasia C. Curwood, Visiting Fellow
James Weldon Johnson Institute for Race and Difference
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

This article examines the significance of Caroline Bond Day’s vindicationist anthropological work on mixed-race families early in the 20th century. Day used the techniques of physical anthropology to demonstrate that mixed-race African Americans were in no way inherently deformed or inferior. Using Day’s published work and unpublished correspondence, I show that her study was noteworthy for two reasons. First, unlike most other anthropologists of her time, but presaging later scholars, she studied her own family and social world, a perspective that both gave her unique data unavailable to others and removed barriers between herself and her subjects. Second, as a mixed-race African American woman, she found herself not only fighting preconceptions about the racial inferiority of African Americans but also serving as a liaison between her research subjects and mainstream, White-dominated physical anthropology. This article argues that Day’s importance as a scholar lies not only in her argument against racial inferiority but also in the outsider-within status that allowed her to make her case within academic anthropology in the early 20th century.

Introduction

Caroline Bond Day (CBD; 1889–1948) was one of the first African American anthropologists to turn her lens on her own people. As a Radcliffe College senior in 1918, she decided to pursue scholarly training in physical anthropology. The African American undergraduate was well aware that anthropologists had long used physical measurements and descriptions to demonstrate the racial inferiority of non-White people, and that many scholars thought the racial mixing of Whites and African Americans would create aberrant, malformed offspring. As a race woman, that is, an advocate for race consciousness and race pride who also experienced the effects of sexism, Day sought to combine the tools of anthropologists and her own social networks to refute the idea of mongrelization.

In 1932, under the supervision of Harvard physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, Day published her Radcliffe master’s thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States. It showed that the mixture of African Americans and Whites simply yielded children with some characteristics of each race, who were entirely normal. In fact, Day observed, these offspring were often middle-class and lived lives that were very like those of middle-class White people, although in U.S. culture they were regarded as African American. As an outsider within her field, Day adapted the methods of anthropology to her own uses.

Caroline Bond Day reflected the desire of many Black intellectuals, led by her teacher W. E. B. Du Bois, to redirect scholarly and popular ideas about African Americans away from the realm of pathology and stereotype. St. Clair Drake, himself a scholar-activist who spent his career from the 1930s to the 1980s charting African Americans’ experiences of domination, adaptation, and resistance (Harrison 1992:253), called this intellectual tradition of refuting racist and imperialist assertions of Black inferiority “racial vindication” and situated CBD within it (Drake 1980:2, 10; Harrison and Harrison 1999a, 1999b:12). Like many other scholars and social activists of her period, she presented what she thought was the best possible image to the White gaze. In her case, this meant members of the “best families” among Black Americans, most of whom, she demonstrated, had White and, in some cases, Indian ancestry. She had faith that the scientific quantification of race could help with the task that Drake prescribed for Black intellectuals and that John L. Gwaltney would take on 50 years later: “setting the historical record straight” (Baber 1998:198; Gwaltney 1981[1980]xxiv).

This essay contains some preliminary explorations into the intersection of her work and life as a Black woman and anthropologist in the early 20th century. Building on the work of Faye V. Harrison (1992:244) and Hubert B. Ross et al. (1999:40), and drawing on additional archival (CBD Papers) and secondary (Alexander 1999) sources that did not inform those earlier works, this essay documents her early influences, including her relationship with Du Bois and exposure to Franz Boas, and the methodologies with which she later challenged the discipline of anthropology…

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , ,

‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive on 2010-11-10 02:37Z by Steven

‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day

Visual Studies
Volume 21, Issue 2
(October 2006)
pages 106-132
DOI: 10.1080/14725860600944971

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

This article examines a collection of family photographs published in an unusual 1932 anthropological study of ‘Negro-White families’. In the 1920s Caroline Bond Day, a woman of mixed ancestry herself, gathered family histories and photographs of over 300 ‘Negro-White families’ for her graduate work at Harvard University under eugenicist Ernest Hooton. Day’s subjects, recruited from her circles of friends and acquaintances, shared her goals of African American equality and uplift but were often suspicious of her chosen field. Anthropology has often been referred to as the handmaiden of colonialism and racism, and physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not generally supportive of African American civil rights movements prior to World War II. Nevertheless, about 350 families submitted family histories and photographs and filled out surveys. Some also allowed themselves to be measured with calipers. The published study included over four hundred photographs, which collectively provide a visual mediation between Day’s political goals, her exclusive focus on mixed-race families and her use of physical anthropology and blood-quantum language. Day’s work remains controversial, but continues to be used by scholars, activists and artists in part because of its unique focus and methods.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , ,

An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

Posted in Anthologies, Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery on 2010-08-10 04:14Z by Steven

An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

New York University Press
2004-02-01
675 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781432
Paperback ISBN: 9780814781449

Edited by

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus’ ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O’Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,