Mixed Race Studies

Black and Jewish: Language and Multiple Strategies for Self-Presentation

American Jewish History
Volume 100, Number 1, January 2016
pages 51-71
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2016.0001

Sarah Bunin Benor, Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, California

In January 2014, hip-hop star Drake hosted “Saturday Night Live” (SNL), opening with a skit about his black Jewish identity. In this skit, which takes place at his bar mitzvah reception, language is central to the comedy: Drake’s white Jewish mother has an exaggerated New York-sounding accent, and she uses Hebrew and Yiddish words — “tuchuses,” “oy vey,” “goy,” and “mazel tov.” His black dad uses features of African-American English, like /th/ sometimes pronounced as /d/, and he jokingly highlights his lack of knowledge of Drake’s mom’s Jewish language: “Torah, aliyah — man, I know dose girls, I met them on da road.” When Drake enters, he greets his relatives with words associated with each group: “To my mom’s side of the family I say, ‘Shabbat shalom,’ and to my dad’s side, I say ‘Wasssupppp.’” Drake proceeds to sing and rap about being black and Jewish, incorporating strains of “Hava Nagila” and hip hop, and highlighting stereotypical characteristics and linguistic features of both groups: “I play ball like LeBron [James], and I know what a W-2 is. Chillin’ in Boca Raton with my mensch Lenny Kravitz [another black Jew], the only purple drink we sip is purple Manischewitz. At my show you won’t simply put your hands in the air; we can also raise a chair or recite a Jewish prayer… I eat… knishes with my bitches … I celebrate Hanukkah, date a Rianika… You’re Jewish and black and you’re — challah!”

The juxtaposition of stereotypical linguistic, culinary, and celebratory practices associated with African Americans and Jews is funny to the audience because of the incongruence: The audience is not used to observing these practices in the same room, let alone the same individual. In addition, the presentation is intelligible as indexing black Jewishness because people outside the black and Jewish communities associate these practices with black people and Jewish people, respectively. Even if Drake does not use cultural combinations like these in his everyday life, he (along with the SNL production team) considers them appropriate for a parodic performance of his black Jewish identity.

Drake’s performance represents a growing phenomenon: individuals presenting themselves to the public as black Jews through comedy, performance art, interviews, and memoirs. In all of these “performances” (the term used broadly to refer to any speech act intended for consumption by a large audience), language plays an important role in how speakers align themselves with African Americans, with Jews, or with both. In this paper, I analyze nine such performances, focusing on the nine individuals’ use of linguistic features associated with Jews and with African Americans. This analysis points to the importance of language in self-presentation, as well as to the diversity of black Jews.

Black Jews

First, a bit of background on black Jews and on language associated with both groups. A common origin of black Jews is the union of a white Jew and a black non-Jew (sometimes involving the conversion of one spouse). This is the case for Drake and five of the nine individuals featured in the analysis below. The biracial children of these unions are sometimes raised with Judaism as their religion, sometimes with a Jewish cultural identity, and sometimes with no Jewish identity or practice. Another common origin occurs when white Jewish parents adopt children from Africa or from African-American birth parents and raise them as Jews, sometimes officially converting them. In addition to these individuals who grow up black and Jewish, many black people adopt Judaism later in life. Some of these converts are attracted to Judaism for spiritual or theological reasons, and others for social, cultural, or communal reasons, such as having Jewish friends or partners. Smaller numbers of black Jews immigrated to the United States from Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, some black Jews are descendants of black people who converted to Judaism or who had children with white Jews several generations ago. In some families, Judaism goes back to the days of slavery, when black slaves sometimes adopted the religion of their white owners, a very small percentage of whom were Jewish.

Some discussions of…

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Quicksand and Passing – Nella Larsen

The Writes of Woman: Reviews of books by female writers
2015-11-24

Naomi Frisby

Quicksand and Passing are two novellas packaged together and reissued by Serpent’s Tale in the UK. They both share the key theme of being a woman of colour in America early in the twentieth century but the two pieces explore ideas around this in different ways.

Helga Crane is twenty-three and a teacher at Naxos, ‘the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country’. Helga’s out of favour at the school and urgently wishes to leave despite her engagement to a colleague. Her fiancé has ‘naturalized’, fitting into the school and its values. Helga, however, ‘…could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity’. She’s failed to impress his family too:

Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t “belong”. You could be queer, or even attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you had a family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody has ever heard, it was presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous and conformable…

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From the Archives: Adrian Piper’s “Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Beings”

Art in America
2015-05-29 (Orignially published November 2001)

Eleanor Heartney

Adrian Piper, the uncompromising Berlin-based American artist and philosopher whose work applies the rigorous strictures of conceptual art to questions of race and identity, was awarded a Golden Lion award at the 56th Venice Biennale earlier this month. Piper received the honor for her participation in “All the World’s Futures,” where she showed The Probable Trust Registry. The piece asks participants to pledge to live by one or more of the following tenets: “I will mean everything I say”; “I will do everything I say I will do”; and “I will always be too expensive to buy.”

In this A.i.A. article from the November 2001 issue, reproduced below, contributing editor Eleanor Heartney reflects on Piper’s tendency “to favor the confrontational over the conciliatory” on the occasion of several traveling retrospectives of her work.

Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Beings

By Eleanor Heartney

Adrian Piper has long pursued twin careers in art and philosophy. In response to a traveling retrospective, the author ponders the artistic consequences—and seeming contradictions—of Piper’s analytical observations about race.

Does race exist? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, believes not. Labeling race a biological myth, the Harvard scholar has added that from a social and political perspective, race is best understood as a metaphor for something else and not an essence or a thing in itself. [1]

Adrian Piper’s career has been, in one sense, an exploration of this theory. As a light-skinned black woman who, she points out in works like Colored (1988) and My Calling (Cards), 1986-90, could easily pass for white, Piper questions the validity of racial categorization and examines the prevalence of social stereotyping. If race cannot be defined by science or be determined by a person’s visual appearance, she asks, why does it continue to retain such a powerful hold on the human psyche? And what, if anything, can be done to expose its artificiality in a way that will destroy its power?

Many artists have explored the subject of race in recent years, but Piper has been conducting her inquiry from a rather uncommon position. For the last quarter century she has pursued parallel careers as a visual artist with an extensive international exhibition history and as a professor of philosophy, currently on the faculty of Wellesley College. If autobiography provided the starting point for her exploration of race and racism, philosophy has shaped the form of her inquiries. But in the process, the application of abstract philosophical principles to this seemingly intractable social problem produces certain contradictions which suggest that even Piper is not immune to the insidious fictions of race…

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Everyone’s Problem: Adrian Piper Tackles the Complexities of Race Relations Head-On

Artspace
2015-12-30

Artspace Editors

Adrian Piper receiving her Golden Lion from the 2015 Venice Biennale

The artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s direct and subtly intellectual approach to unpacking the tangled issues of race, gender, identity, and belonging has inspired a generation of socially-conscious artists across all media, although her impact is just now being fully recognized: she was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best artist at this year’s Venice Biennale, and MoMA has recently announced plans for, in the words of Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times, “the most comprehensive exhibition to date on the conceptual artist,” set to open in 2018. In this excerpt from Phaidon’s Defining Contemporary Art, the curator Connie Butler responds to one of Piper’s most important video and installation works, Cornered from 1988.

Adrian Piper’s conceptual explorations of race and difference have made her a critical influence on subsequent generations of artists exploring race and the construction of identity. By 1988—after two decades in which she moved from a relatively traditional conceptual art practice to using her own body in her work, and to locating her subject matter in the fluidity of identity—she had begun to explore her own struggles with racial identity: namely, people’s assumptions about her race and their corresponding behavior towards her.

The pivotal video installation Cornered addresses this in the straightforward, analytical fashion common to all of Piper’s work. Viewers encounter the artist herself, a light-skinned black woman, looking out at them from a monitor placed in the corner of a room. On either side of it hang her father’s two birth certificates—one that identifies him as white, the other as black. A large table upended in front of the monitor distances us from all this, keeping Piper at a remove in space. Despite this, the artist faces us calmly and begins matter-of-factly. “I’m black. Now, let’s deal with this social fact, and the fact of my stating it, together. Maybe you don’t see why we have to deal with it together. Maybe you think this is just my problem, and that I should deal with it by myself. But it’s not just my problem. It’s our problem.”…

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“I Don’t See Color” Personal and Critical Perspectives on White Privilege

Pennsylvania State University Press
2015
280 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-06499-4

Edited by:

Bettina Bergo, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Tracey Nicholls, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois

Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to speak English. Whiteness is an allegorical category before it is demographic.

This volume gathers together some of the most influential scholars of privilege and marginalization in philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, literature, and history to examine the idea of whiteness. Drawing from their diverse racial backgrounds and national origins, these scholars weave their theoretical insights into essays critically informed by personal narrative. This approach, known as “braided narrative,” animates the work of award-winning author Eula Biss. Moved by Biss’s fresh and incisive analysis, the editors have assembled some of the most creative voices in this dialogue, coming together across the disciplines.

Along with the editors, the contributors are Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Nyla R. Branscombe, Drucilla Cornell, Lewis R. Gordon, Paget Henry, Ernest-Marie Mbonda, Peggy McIntosh, Mark McMorris, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Victor Ray, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Louise Seamster, Tracie L. Stewart, George Yancy, and Heidi A. Zetzer.

Table Contents

• Preface / Eula Biss
• Introduction / Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls
• Part I. What is White Privilege?
  • Chapter 1: Deprivileging Philosophy / Peggy McIntosh
  • Chapter 2: White Privilege and the Problem with Affirmative Action / Lewis R. Gordon
  • Chapter 3: Revisioning “White Privilege” / Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
• Part II. The Images and Rhetoric of White Privilege
  • Chapter 4: The Very Image of Privilege: Film Creation of White Transcendentals in Vienna and Hollywood / Bettina Bergo
  • Chapter 5: Painting and Negotiating Colors / Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
  • Chapter 6: I Was an Honorary White Man: Reflections on Space, Place, and Origin / Mark McMorris
• Part III. Troubling Privilege
  • Chapter 7: Whiteness as Insidious: On the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self / George Yancy
  • Chapter 8: White Privilege: The Luxury of Undivided Attention / Heidi A. Zetzer
  • Chapter 9: The Costs of Privilege and Dividends of Privilege Awareness: The Social Psychology of Confronting Inequality / Tracie L. Stewart and Nyla R. Branscombe
  • Chapter 10: Unpacking the Imperialist Knapsack: White Privilege and Imperialism in Obama’s America / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Victor Ray, and Louise Seamster
• Part IV. Other Perspectives on White and Western Privilege
  • Chapter 11: Whiteness and Africana Political Economy / Paget Henry
  • Chapter 12: The Great White North: Failing Muslim-Canadians – Failing Us All / Tracey Nicholls
  • Chapter 13: Rethinking Ethical Feminism through uBuntu / Drucilla Cornell
  • Chapter 14: The Afrocentrist Critique of Eurocentrism: The Decolonization of Knowledge /Ernest-Marie Mbonda
• Contributor Biographies

Hairy Paws and Bald Heads: Anxiety and Authority in W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty

American Literary Realism
Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016
pages 95-111

James Weaver, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Intensely concerned with the cultural and personal implications of miscegenation and its resultant social upheaval, W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty (1891) documents how late-nineteenth-century racial fears become entangled in the medical discourse of the period. Ultimately a romance that brings together the liberal-minded nerve doctor Edward Olney and the refined but tragically mulatta Rhoda Aldgate, the novel traces the ways in which Olney both contests and affirms a racially and socially conservative point of view. As Michele Birnbaum points out, the novel “narrate[s] the young woman’s coming of age as a medical condition.” We might also see Howells’ novel as the coming-of-age story of its protagonist doctor—a coming of age that relies heavily upon his personal and professional relationship with that young woman. Importantly, we can see Olney’s change over the course of the narrative not just as the expression of his developing love for Aldgate but as the incremental recovery of his professional identity. Despite the personal transformations Olney experiences during the course of Howells’ novel, his professional transformation emerges as the more accurate index of Olney’s attitude toward issues of race and class. As Olney assumes a democratic openness toward Aldgate’s “taint” of dark ancestry, he also assumes a medical authority that transforms his romance with her into a doctor-patient relationship. That relationship is further predicated on Olney’s lingering anxieties over his medical authority and economic stability as well as on a troubling erasure of Aldgate’s racial identity. Reading An Imperative Duty in light of such influential contemporary medical texts as S. Weir Mitchell’s Doctor and Patient and George M. Beard’s American Nervousness, then, enables us to see Olney’s transition from nervous doctor to nerve doctor—a distinction that, however coy, aptly indicates how Howells’ hero-doctor is able to “cure” not only his and Aldgate’s racial anxieties but also his own nagging fears about his social, cultural, and medical authority.

Recent criticism of Howells’ novel has usefully explored the ways in which it engages with the racial discourse of the time, as critics have tried to assess the race politics ultimately articulated by Howells. Many of those essays have situated An Imperative Duty against the backdrop of U.S. immigration debates and concerns over citizenship; in dialogue with developments in realist aesthetics and American pragmatism; or in relation to the tradition of passing novels, the trope of the tragic mulatto, and late-nineteenth-century fears about miscegenation. In this essay I’d like to frame my analysis of An Imperative Duty and Dr. Olney against a different cultural backdrop: the rise of “nervous diseases” and the corresponding efforts in the American medical community to organize professionally and consolidate power and privilege through its possession of scientific knowledge. By folding this consideration of Dr. Olney’s professional identity into our larger understanding of Howells’ novel, I hope to illuminate the ways in which the racial and medical discourses of the novel intersect with and reinforce one another, reasserting an entrenched white male privilege despite initially seeming to question those avenues of power.

Before I turn to Howells’ novel, though, let me contextualize that analysis by rehearsing in general terms the late-nineteenth-century medical discourse regarding neurasthenia and by outlining the power relations embedded in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. George M. Beard first employed the term “neurasthenia” to describe a state of nervous exhaustion in an 1869 speech to the New York Medical Association. A Yale graduate and two-year veteran of the Union navy’s medical staff during the Civil War, Beard finished his medical degree at New York’s College of Physicians in 1866 and almost immediately began a focused study of nervous diseases that culminated in his 1881 text American Nervousness, his most comprehensive treatise on neurasthenia, its causes and effects, and its national significance. In that text, Beard argues against a faculty psychology interpretation of nervousness, contending that the term does not indicate “unbalanced mental organization” or “a predominance of the emotional” but rather “a lack of nerve-force.” As he writes, “Nervousness is nervelessness.” For Beard, neurasthenia was thus a strictly…

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Racial Fictions and the Cultural Work of Genre in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars

American Literary Realism
Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016
pages 128-146

Melissa Asher Rauterkus, Assistant Professor of English
University of Alabama, Birmingham

I intend to record my impressions of men and things, and such incidents or conversations which take place within my knowledge, with a view to future use in literary work. I shall not record stale negro minstrel jokes, or worn out newspaper squibs on the “man and brother.” I shall leave the realm of fiction, where most of this stuff is manufactured, and come down to hard facts.

Charles W. Chesnutt, 16 March 1880, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt

Fifteen years of life in the South, in one of the most eventful eras of its history; among a people whose life is rich in the elements of romance; under conditions calculated to stir one’s soul to the very depths;—I think there is here a fund of experience, a supply of material. . . . [I]f I do write, I shall write for a purpose. . . . The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites.

Charles W. Chesnutt, 29 May 1880, Journals of Chesnutt

In a pivotal scene in The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Judge Straight and John Warwick, the formerly black office boy turned white attorney, discuss the legal loopholes that permit his racial passing. Pleased to see his old disciple, but afraid that John’s stay in Patesville will compromise his new identity, Straight reminds John that “custom is stronger than law” and in matters of race “custom is law.” Alluding to the legal technicality that makes John a white man in South Carolina (where race is determined by reputation and social standing) but a black man in North Carolina (where race is defined by fractions of blood), Straight suggests that when it comes to the color line, the cultural fictions we create (as in the one-drop rule) ultimately organize our reality. In many respects, this critical observation sits at the center of the novel’s racial critique, opening up into a broader analysis of the relationship between the fictiveness of race and fiction in a more literal sense. Exploring the subject of racial passing through the lenses of realism and romance, the text issues a complex metaliterary statement that articulates how generic traditions and conventions produce racial identities.

That genre is tangled up in the novel’s deconstruction of race suggests that literary traditions and their conventions can in fact perform important cultural work. In some ways, the novel’s greatest realist achievement is its insistence that popular fiction can be deployed to bring about social and literary change. In the epigraphs that begin this essay, Chesnutt expresses his desire to use fiction as a means to initiate an ethical and moral revolution to eradicate racism. The first passage promises a more realistic approach while the second one highlights the romantic quality of black life, suggesting that it might provide the ideal material for socially conscious fiction; that is, documenting the unbelievably horrific conditions under which most black people suffer may be the single most effective strategy for softening white people’s feelings towards blacks and stamping out racial injustice. In The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt combines both perspectives, playing out the story of racial passing along generic lines to demonstrate the power of fiction to alter the social and literary landscape.

In what follows, I offer a metaliterary critique of the novel’s textual complexity, calling specific attention to the racial uses of genre. In a series of close readings, I explore the at times puzzling and seemingly contradictory aspects of a novel whose formal intricacies have not yet been fully acknowledged or evaluated. Focusing on three major developments that stand at the center of the novel’s subtly ironic deconstruction of race—the opening sequence, the tournament, and the fatal conclusion in the swamp—I investigate how Chesnutt and his characters marshal the discourses of realism and romance to manipulate the fictions of race. Accentuating the ways in which they use genre as a tool to reinvent their racial identities, I want to underscore the connections between literary fictions and racial fictions. By working through these connections, I seek to bring into greater relief the generic significance of Chesnutt’s…

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Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

New York University Press
August 2001
283 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781227
Paper ISBN: 9780814781234

Edited by:

María C. Sánchez, Associate Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Linda Schlossberg, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University

Passing for what you are not—whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women–can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing’s radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion.

Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan’s mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class.

Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines—from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies—Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity.

Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O’Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez, Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

New York University Press
April 2014
273 pages
12 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9781479812981
Paper ISBN: 9781479859498

Ellen Samuels, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Crisis of Identification
• Part I Fantasies of Fakery
  • 1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
  • 2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
  • 3. The Disability Con Onscreen
• Part II Fantasies of Marking
  • 4. The Trials of Salomé Müller
  • 5. Of Fiction and Fingerprints
• Part III Fantasies of Measurement
  • 6. Proving Disability
  • 7. Revising Blood Quantum
  • 8. Realms of Biocertification
  • 9. DNA and the Readable Self
• Conclusion: Future Identifications
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

From Necessity to Possibility: Postmodern and Heideggerian Aspects of Passing and Identity in Early African American Novels From 1853 to 1912

Sage Open
October-December 2015
pages 1-15
DOI: 10.1177/2158244015618234

Charles Cullum
Department of English
Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts

This article applies theories of fragmented postmodern identity and Heidegger’s modes of existence and concept of historicality to the issue of passing and traces the treatment of that motif across six African American novels that move from the largely realistic perspective of the 19th century to the subjectivist perspective of the early 20th century. These novels thus foreshadow the postmodernist questioning of the basis of discrete personal identity. The article claims that, across these novels, the act of passing and its relationship to human identity through time and historical circumstance becomes problematized from a necessary tool for escaping slavery, and so sustaining identity in its most basic form as life itself, to a potential existential dilemma of identity as a matter of authenticity and possibility. The article further discusses whether the individual is constrained by his or her background, especially, by race itself, or is a totally free, ungrounded agent.

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