Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
My mother was Martha Bell Smith, the daughter of Luanda Smith. Grandma Cindy, a fair-skinned slave, was the daughter of a slave by that slave’s master. As a teenager, she was purchased from a white family in Memphis, Tennessee. Her purchaser—a man known to my family as “Cap’n Anderson”—turned out to be my grandfather.
Ada Lois’s Mother, Martha Bell Smith Sipuel
Cap’n Anderson carried Grandma Cindy to his plantation near Belarie, Arkansas, in Chicot County. There he raised two separate families “in the same yard.” One family was by his wife, a white woman who bore him seven children, the other by my grandmother, who also bore seven. The two sets of children, each child born within two months of its counterpart, were delivered by the same black midwife. One set lived in a large white house in the middle of the plantation. The other, the group that included my mother, lived about a mile away in a small but tidy cabin.
The children of both families played together. In fact, I have heard my mother often speak of her white “brothers” and “sisters.” According to family legend, one of the white brothers became a prominent Arkansas politician, who went on to serve the state’s (all-white) voters for several years in the capitol at Little Rock. My mother told me that she once had called him when she passed through Little Rock.
According to her, his voice joyfully greeted her on the telephone. In fact, he invited her to come by the capitol for a friendly brother-sister visit; but, he added, she would have to keep her “little pickaninnies” away. Mother slammed down the phone. As far as I know, she never spoke to her brother again. His white wife sent her the newspaper clipping that announced the esteemed gentleman’s death.
Grandma Cindy’s seven children all kept the name Smith, perhaps in ironic tribute to an earlier master. The oldest was Frank, who was born a slave on his own father’s plantation in 1862, during the Civil War. The others were Kitty, Lucinda, Nan, Scott, and Gertrude. My mother, Martha Bell Smith, was the youngest, born in 1892.
My mother’s memory was that Cap’n Anderson’s black children had little use for their white father. When he would call on my grandmother, he often brought them little gifts of candy and the like, but the children all feared him. It was not that he ever beat or otherwise abused them. Instead, it seemed that they all instinctively distrusted the man and rejected what they took to be his immoral ways with their own mother. That attitude always troubled Grandma Cindy, who overlooked the circumstances of their relationship to proclaim that Cap’n Anderson was the only man that she had ever loved and the only man who ever had touched her.
When Frank was a very young man, he built a modest house and moved his mother and younger siblings off the plantation. Mother grew up in Dermott, Arkansas. The family baby, she had the best of what little was available, and she was the only one to receive any substantial education. After finishing Dermott’s public schools, she graduated from the little two-year teachers’ academy in the town and became a schoolteacher herself.
Ada Lois’s Father, Bishop Travis B. Sipuel
Stunningly beautiful, with light skin, hazel eyes, and hair that bore the slightest curl, she was teaching when she met my father, a handsome, very dark-skinned railroad man nearly fifteen years older than she. He was smitten hard and immediately. All of Grandma Cindy’s fair-skinned children married extremely dark spouses. His greatest drawback seemed to be his age. I remember her telling me that when he came courting she would tell her mother, “Mama, here comes your beau. He must be coming for you; he’s too old for me.”
Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context, in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness. The big secret I knew — and Ms. Harris surely knows it as well — is that our Blackness was born not out of something lost but out of something gained.
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Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.
Table of Contents
Series Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Historical Context
2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
We seem to be beginning yet another season of a perennially popular American spectacle, “How Much Is That Mulatto in the Window?” I frequently think that, after 400 years, this show is about to go off the air — jump the shark, as it were. But then it returns, with ever more absurd plot lines. Yet even as a so-called mulatto myself, I can’t stop watching.
The Hollywood pitch goes something like this: Put racially ambiguous Black people in the public eye — Kamala, Meghan, Barack. Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figures of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.
On last week’s episode, Donald Trump got his cameo, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of switching races. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said during an appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. His staged bewilderment, implying that she was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery, felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions. Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulattophobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question — What are you? — someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying, of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.
Multiracial, mulatto, mixed-nuts, halfies — whatever you want to call us today, we remain the fastest-growing demographic in our country. When we enter the spotlight, we are often treated as specimens, there to be dissected, poked, debated, disputed and disinherited. We are and always have been a Rorschach test for how the world is processing its anxiety, rage, confusion and desire about this amorphous construction we call race…
University of Pennsylvania Press
June 2017
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in, 10 illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812249187
Paperback ISBN: 9780812224603
eBook ISBN:
Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves’ interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners’ medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.
Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.
Contents
Introduction. Transforming Bodies
Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
During his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists this week, Donald Trump was asked if he would call upon his fellow Republicans to refrain from labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “D.E.I. candidate” for the presidency. Rather than condemn his party’s increasingly troubling language on the topic, Mr. Trump took the opportunity to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”
This is all clearly untrue. Ms. Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. Her biographies and self-descriptions throughout her career have cited both her Black and Indian identities.
My wife is white, so we have multiracial children. Depending on the context, they can refer to themselves as Black or multiracial. When my children describe themselves using the latter term, they are acknowledging that their mother is a part of their story as well. Does Mr. Trump really expect interracial people to deny half of their families?…
Inspired by a real-life scandal that was shocking even for the tumultuous Roaring Twenties, this captivating novel tells the story of a pioneering Black journalist, a secret interracial marriage among the New York elite, and the sensational divorce case that ignited an explosive battle over race and class—and brought together three very different women fighting for justice, legitimacy, and the futures they risked everything to shape.
For readers of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a transporting work of fact-based historical fiction from Denny S. Bryce, bestselling author of Wild Women and the Blues, In the Face of the Sun, and Can’t We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.
New York, 1924. Born to English immigrants who’ve built a comfortable life, idealistic Alice Jones longs for the kind of true love her mother and father have. She believes she’s found it with Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the shy heir to his prominent white family’s real estate fortune. Alice too, is “white”, though she is vaguely aware of rumors that question her ancestry—gossip her parents dismiss. But when the lovers secretly wed, Kip’s parents threaten his inheritance unless he annuls the marriage.
Devastated but determined, Alice faces overwhelming odds both legally and in the merciless court of public opinion. But there is one person who can either help her—or shatter her hopes for good: Reporter Marvel Cunningham. The proud daughter of an accomplished Black family, Marvel lives to chronicle social change and the Harlem Renaissance’s fiery creativity.
At first, Marvel sees Alice’s case as a tabloid sensation generated by a self-hating woman who failed to “pass.” But the deeper she investigates, the more she will recognize just how much she and Alice have in common. For Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander will bring to light stunning truths that will force both women to confront who they are, and who they can be, in a world that is all too quick to judge.
Kamala Harris has long resisted attempts by others to categorize her identity. “I am who I am,” she once said. “I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.” Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Even as Trump plays up racial divisions, many Americans said they would rather not dwell on race or identity. “We can all see that you’re Black.”
“Obviously, we have eyes.”
That was the somewhat jaded response by Larhonda Marshall, a 42-year-old health care worker from Chicago, about all the attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.
As a Black woman herself, Ms. Marshall said that the symbolism of a Harris victory would surely be on her mind as she considers her vote for president. But it was not the most important factor at all, she said. And she wishes the Harris supporters who keep mentioning it would drop it.
“I’m tired of hearing it,” Ms. Marshall said. “That’s not an issue. I just want what’s best for the country.”
This week, after former President Donald J. Trumpclaimed falsely that Ms. Harris “happened to turn Black” only recently, the vice president did not attempt to clarify the obvious: that she has, in fact, been Black all her life…
There is a multitude of problems with Trump’s comments, from his presumption that he has the expertise and jurisdiction to judge someone else’s identity to his argument that Harris lacks the racial bona fides to merit the Black audience members’ allegiance. But the former president’s ramble offers another important conclusion: Trump simply doesn’t understand race. When Trump asks for somebody to “look into that,” the truth is that for years researchers have looked into that. What they’ve found is that overly simplified perspectives on race like Trump’s are not only misplaced, but they are counterproductive and dangerous.
Scholars of race have long argued, and demonstrated, that race is a socially constructed category that still has very real outcomes. We, as members of society, constantly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct what race means.
Even the basics of how race is measured in America have evolved over time. The 1850 U.S. census was the first to acknowledge people of multiracial descent, with the category “Mulatto” used as a way to exclude them from having full political rights. Not until the 2000 census were multiracial Americans able to formally mark more than one racial identity. In fact, the multiracial population is the fastest growing racial group in the United States, with a 276% increase between 2010 and 2020…
Kamala Harris spoke during the virtual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Unity Summit in 2021. Erin Scott for The New York Times
Some Asian American leaders are rooting for Kamala Harris to become the first Asian American president. But she is not widely known as Asian American, reflecting the complexity of the identity.
Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.
“I never got that impression,” said Mr. Chiang, 38, a Taiwanese American from Connecticut.
Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.
But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation…
Embark on an inspiring journey through the captivating narratives of “Mixed Desis,” a book creating community for and gathering the voices of mixed-race individuals, interracial families, and multiracial family researchers. Within these pages, you’ll find the heartfelt stories of trailblazers who dared to defy convention in their pursuit of love and life.
Listen to this community of brave, vulnerable, and perceptive multiracial South Asians as they share their journeys toward happiness, balance, and self-actualization.
Join us in celebrating the resilience, love, and strength of these remarkable individuals. Purchase “Mixed Desis” today and empower yourself with knowledge, empathy, and a deeper connection to the vibrant tapestry of human experience. Your journey to understanding and unity begins here.
