Mixed Race Studies

The “Miscegenation” Troll

JSTOR Daily
2019-02-20

Mark Sussman, Adjunct Professor of English
Hunter College, City University of New York

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author.

In 1864, a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro” began to circulate on the streets of New York. The title certainly would have given New Yorkers pause. No one had ever seen the word “miscegenation” before. In fact, the pamphlet’s anonymous author invented it, giving the reason that “amalgamation”—then the most common term used to describe “race mixing”—was a “poor word, since it properly refers to the union of metals with quicksilver.” The term “miscegenation”—from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race)—had only one definition.

Besides introducing a new word into the English language, the pamphleteer was also responsible for what appeared to be one of the most fearless documents in the archive of nineteenth century abolitionist writing. Among many other claims and political recommendations, the pamphlet notes that, “the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed;” that “a continuance of progress can only be obtained through a judicious crossing of diverse elements;” that “the Caucasian, or white race… has never yet developed a religious faith on its own;” that “the true ideal man can only be reached by blending the type man and woman of all the races of the earth;” that “the most beautiful girl in form, feature, and every attribute of feminine loveliness [the pamphleteer] ever saw, was a mulatto.” Most provocatively, the writer claimed that “the Southern beauty… proclaims by every massive ornament in her shining hair, and by every yellow shade in the wavy folds of her dress, ‘I love the black man.’”…

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What Passes as Love: A Novel (Review)

Washington Independent Review of Books
2021-08-31

Gisèle Lewis

Thomas, Trisha R., What Passes as Love: A Novel (Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2021)

An escaped slave navigates the white world in a suspenseful bid for freedom.

Trisha R. Thomas, best known for her successful Nappily Ever After series, offers now an historical novel about a Black woman passing as white in 1850s Virginia. In What Passes as Love, Dahlia is the light-skinned daughter of Lewis Holt, a wealthy white plantation owner. She is also his slave, one of nearly a dozen he has fathered with his Black laborers.

Thanks to her beauty, Dahlia is brought by Holt into the mansion to live and serve as a ladies’ maid for her spoiled white half-sisters. Caught between guilt over the preferential treatment she receives and petty jealousy from her masters, Dahlia yearns for a better existence. Suddenly, the chance for one appears.

During an outing to town on her 16th birthday, she is mistaken for white by a young man. When he abruptly proposes marriage that very afternoon, she embraces the opportunity to escape slavery without questioning his motives. But once installed as lady of the manor — under the name Lily Dove — at her new husband’s plantation, maintaining the lie about her parentage becomes a matter of life and death. Dahlia’s new mother-in-law analyzes her every move, her rogue brother-in-law wants her for himself, and the slaves who suspect her runaway status use her secret as blackmail…

Read the entire review here.

Doublings and Dissociation in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Volume 27, 2022 – Issue 3-4: after modernism: women, gender, race. issue editor: pelagia goulimari
Pages 182-198
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093974

Jean Wyatt, Professor of English; Emerita
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929) and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). Oyeyemi claims Larsen’s novel as an influential forbear. When the protagonist of Larsen’s Passing, Irene, is in the presence of her friend Clare, she acts, speaks, and expresses her feelings in a far different mode from her usual rigid conformity to ladylike propriety. She seems, indeed, to be a different person. Although critics have long seen Clare as an alter ego for Irene, I argue instead that it is Clare’s presence that brings out in Irene an alter ego, a new personality structure. Using as a theoretical framework Philip Bromberg’s model of subjectivity as a series of alternating self-states – each distinct and discontinuous with the others – I argue that Larsen is giving the nineteenth-century alter ego of literary tradition a new depth by dramatizing the way a subject changes personality to a different self as a result of a close relationship with a particular other. Irene’s subjectivity is further complicated by her enactment of upper-class “lady” in her every gesture, tone, and word. The performed identity of (white) “lady” is at odds with the everyday reality of Irene’s social position as middle-class black wife and mother. Attention to the multiplicity of Irene’s competing self-states, and her growing loss of control over them, can help us to understand the ambiguous final scene in which Irene (apparently) pushes Clare out of a sixth-floor window to her death. In Boy, Snow, Bird alter egos proliferate. To manage the relentless physical and mental abuse that the character narrator Boy endures from her father, Boy finds escape in colloquies with her mirror image. The mirror image is separate from Boy (she does not recognize it as her own reflection) and has its own agenda, sometimes replacing Boy’s subjectivity with its own. Later in the novel, we learn that Frances, Boy’s mother, after suffering a violent rape, saw in her mirror a male figure and transformed herself into that male identity. [The novel seems to ask readers to think of both instances of wounded identity and the adoption of alter egos in relationship to each other.] This is not Bromberg’s “normal” dissociation as an alternation of self-states, but a lasting and severe dissociation as a last defense against trauma. Boy and Frances are using the mirror double as an escape from unbearable reality. When, to her surprise, Boy gives birth to an African American baby, the intense anxiety about her child’s future in the racist United States causes a different kind of splitting: she feels herself transforming into the wicked stepmother of the fairy tale “Snow White.” She indeed becomes cruel, unfeeling, and damaging to her innocent stepdaughter Snow. In both novels, the complex depiction of alter egos reflects the psychic complications of subjects trying to survive in the racist social order of the United States.

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Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

The New York Times
2018-02-14

Anna Kisselgoff

Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.

Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.

Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…

…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…

Read the entire obituary here.

‘It chips away at you’: Misty Copeland on the whiteness of ballet

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2022-11-14

Terry Gross, Host

At first, Misty Copeland thought the pain she was experiencing was shin splits. It was 2012, and, after 12 years with the American Ballet Theatre, Copeland, one of the few Black dancers in the company, had finally landed her first leading role in a classical work.

“I knew how critical this moment was for my career,” she says. “If I had gone to the artistic staff or the physical therapists and said, ‘I’m in a lot of pain,’ they would have removed me from the rehearsals. And I would not have been able to perform. And I knew that had that happened, I wouldn’t be given the opportunity again.”

So she pushed on, dancing the principal role in The Firebird, despite the fact that the pain was becoming increasingly severe. Finally, toward the end of the company’s season, Copeland was diagnosed with six stress fractures in her tibia — three of which were classified as “dreaded black line” fractures, meaning that there were almost full breaks through the bone.

When the first surgeon warned her that she might never dance again, Copeland was devastated. “It was just like my whole world came crashing down,” she says. “I felt mostly like I was letting down the Black community.”…

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I Now Pronounce You Man and White: Racial Passing and Gender in Charles Chesnutt’s Fiction

American Literary Realism
Volume 52, Issue 3, (Spring 2020)
pages 189-210
DOI: 10.5406/amerlitereal.52.3.0189

Martha J. Cutter, Professor of English
University of Connecticut

As a literary genre in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, many African American-to-white racial passing fictions are built around a stable set of narrative conventions: the passer decides to pass, moves to a new location, takes on a new name and identity, and then either dies, returns to his or her “true” race, or moves out of the United States (usually to Europe). Of course, there are exceptions to these patterns, but many fictional texts well into the first three decades of the twentieth century continue to utilize them to a large degree.² This is not to deny, as some critics contend, that passing texts sometimes disrupt many of the binaries around which identity categories are established and maintained—such as black versus white or male versus female—as well as the visual “logic” of race itself.² Yet many early twentieth-century passing texts conclude by containing to some degree the challenging questions that the passing figure has raised about the durability of categories of race (or gender) through specific types of narrative closure.

Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is unusual in that the male protagonist—John Walden/Warwick—ends up continuing to live in the United States while passing for white; therefore many questions that John’s passing presence has raised about the stability of racial identity are left open at the end of the text. Yet Rena Walden/Warwick, John’s sister, who also passes for white, is dead at the end. Does Chesnutt—who certainly saw race as a social construction,³ although perhaps not gender—ever depict women characters who can maintain a passing presence that keeps open questions about the meaning of whiteness and blackness? In fact there are several texts by Chesnutt in which women pass for white. However, their passing is often allowed, enforced, or enabled by a male (black or white) whom they might marry. In such texts both African American and white men have the ability not only to provide to women an identity as “wife” but also an identity as “white.” These female racial passers are therefore both literally and figuratively granted whiteness only through inscription as patriarchal property within the institution of marriage. Hence the title of this essay: for Chesnutt’s women, it is a male who can pronounce them not only wife, but also white.

A lawyer himself—he had passed the bar in Ohio in 1887—Chesnutt is often viewed as presenting a sophisticated critique of the law and as sometimes “theoriz[ing] imaginative ways that legal principles could be used to repair American race relations.”⁴ Yet is this the case in terms of gender relations—does Chesnutt’s fiction critique and repair gender inequities? Chesnutt’s fiction recognizes the intersectional nature of women’s oppression in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, when women of any race possessed limited rights under the doctrine of coverture and in the face of the denial of women’s suffrage and other political and legal civil liberties; yet his works do not imagine a “repair” of gender relations.⁵ Robyn Wiegman argues that “modern citizenship functions as a disproportionate system in which the universalism ascribed to certain bodies (white, male, propertied) is protected and subtended by the infinite particularity assigned to others (black, female, unpropertied).”⁶ Men who pass into whiteness therefore may become modern citizens with full rights and a universal and unparticularized body. But women who pass into whiteness are still women with limited rights and non-property holders in most states in the U.S. well into the late-nineteenth century, and they are always defined in terms of their bodily particularity and peculiarity. Moreover, within the system of capitalism they are configured as property to be trafficked between men, gifts to be traded back and forth, and it is only specifically through an exchange between men that they can move from a natural realm (a realm outside society) to a social order in which their status (even as objects) can be…

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‘Just a little more free’

Harvard Law Today
2022-11-22

Jeff Neal, Senior Director of Communications and Media Relations
Harvard Law School

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins Professor Martha Jones chronicles her journey into her family’s ties to slavery and to Harvard

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins University Professor Martha S. Jones recounted her family’s historic and ongoing connections both to the institution of slavery and to several academic institutions, including Harvard. Jones, whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy, leads her university’s Hard Histories at Hopkins Project, which works to uncover the role that racism and discrimination have played at the Baltimore-based institution.

The event at which Jones spoke honors Belinda Sutton, a woman who had been enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr., whose 1781 bequest to Harvard College funded a professorship that helped to establish Harvard Law in 1817. The annual lecture and conference series was established earlier this year at Harvard Law School and is organized by Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice…

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Doubts Over Indigenous Identity in Academia Spark ‘Pretendian’ Claims

The New York Times
2022-10-15

Vjosa Isai

Some Canadian universities now require additional proof to back up Indigenous heritage, replacing self-declaration policies.

Since announcing discoveries of evidence last year that hundreds of Indigenous children were likely buried in unmarked graves at church-run residential school sites, Indigenous groups in Canada have captured more national attention.

So, too, has a growing group of Canadian public figures, mostly within academia, who have been accused of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.

Earlier this week, an investigation published by Canada’s national broadcaster, the C.B.C., found that the claims to Cree ancestry of a prominent scholar and former judge, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, did not align with historical records and interviews…

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Confronting Latino Anti-Black Bias

The American Prospect
2022-10-06

Yalidy Matos, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latino and Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University

Civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández takes up a sensitive but critical subject.

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández from Beacon Press

The Latino vote has confounded Democrats who were expecting it not only to grow but also to become a bulwark of a new progressive majority. While a majority of Latinos voted Democratic in the past two presidential elections, the share voting for Donald Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020. That shift, along with more recent polling data, has prompted scholars and journalists alike to ask why Latinos would support a party whose nominee for president was overtly racist and anti-immigrant.

In Racial Innocence, Tanya Katerí Hernández points to Latino anti-Black bias as one answer to this puzzle. A professor of civil rights law at Fordham University, Hernández draws on legal cases from 1964 to 2021, individual stories, interviews with leaders, educators, and attorneys, and academic research to make the case for openly discussing and confronting anti-Black racism within the Latino community.

As an Afro-Latina herself, Hernández explains how her own family history motivated her interest in the topic. Her mother suffered mistreatment and exclusion even by family members, part of a larger pattern of colorism in the Latin world that affects family relations, public spaces, educational institutions, workplaces, housing, and the criminal justice system…

Read the entire review here.

Florence Nightingale’s Rival Gets the Last Laugh

The New York Times
2022-09-07

Linda Villarosa

Florence Nightingale’s Rival Gets the Last Laugh

IN SEARCH OF MARY SEACOLE: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian, by Helen Rappaport

In the 1970s, a group of Jamaican nurses traveled to England to visit the newly relocated grave site of a swashbuckling nurse who had been born in a small town 80 miles west of Kingston, and had worked as a healer and humanitarian during the Crimean War. At the pinnacle of her fame, “Mother Seacole,” as she was known, was compared to Florence Nightingale, widely considered the founder of modern nursing. But the nurses found her grave in disrepair, “its white marble headstone ‘dimmed with mildew and dirt.’” To honor their heroine, the group — along with the British Commonwealth Nurses War Memorial Fund — created an exact replica, replete with blue and gold lettering, palm trees carved in stone and a flag invoking her service to the crown.

Thus began the renaissance of Mary Seacole. In 1984, a small feminist press republished her best-selling 1857 memoir, “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” In 2004, Seacole was voted the “Greatest Black Briton” in an online poll. In 2016, a statue was erected in her honor on the grounds of St. Thomas’s Hospital. An experimental play, “Marys Seacole” — written by the Pulitzer winner Jackie Sibblies Drury — ran in New York and this year opened in London. Gugu Mbatha-Raw will star in an upcoming big-screen biopic…

Read the entire review here.