Mixed Race Studies

A Race or a Nation? Cherokee National Identity and the Status of Freedmen’s Descendents

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 1570
2006-08-17
72 pages

S. Alan Ray, President
Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois

The Cherokee Nation today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation’s highest court affirming the descendents’ citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian “blood quantum” requirement for citizenship. If approved, potentially thousands of African-descended citizens would be eliminated from the tribal registry. In this Article, Professor Ray examines the legal and social history of the Cherokee Freedmen to criticize and reject definitions of Cherokee political identity based on either the federal Dawes Rolls of the allotment era, or notions of “Indian blood.” Both, he argues, are heteronymous authorities for determining tribal citizenship criteria and should be replaced by the critical hermeneutic of indigenous cultural resources. Professor Ray offers a model for constructing tribal citizenship criteria that attempts to deliver ancestry from biology, and law from legal fetishism of the Dawes Rolls. The wise use of sovereignty, he suggests, requires sustained dialogue between Freedmen’s descendents and Cherokees by ancestry, not the “quick fix” of the political process.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. LUCY ALLEN AND THE CHEROKEE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY
• II. THE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY AS A CRISIS OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
  • A. A Race or a Nation? Identity by Blood or Base Roll
  • B. Cherokee Identity: Legal Definitions and their Limits
    • 1. Collective Definitions: The Cherokee Nation
    • 2. Individual Definitions: Citizenship in the Cherokee Nation
    • 3. The Limits of Legal Definitions of Citizenship
  • C. Cherokee Identity: Biological Definitions and their Limits
    • 1. The Construction of the “Red” Race
    • 2. The Construction of “Black” by “Red”
    • 3. Cherokee Slavery and Cherokee Nation
    • 4. The Limits of Biological Definitions of Citizenship
  • D. From Biology to Ancestry, From Legal Fetishism to Law
• III. RADICAL INDIGENISM AS A RESOURCE FOR RESOLVING THE FREEDMEN CONTROVERSY
  • A. Foundational Commitments
  • B. Assumptions of the Model
    • 1. Role of Practical Knowledge
    • 2. Relationship to Spiritual Heritage
    • 3. Effective History of Colonization
  • C. Critical Hermeneutics of Ancestry and Reciprocity
    • 1. Relationship to Ancestry
    • 2. Responsibility to Reciprocity
• CONCLUSION

Read the entire paper here.

Blood Quantum, Race, and Identity in Indian Country

January 2011
32 pages

Sarah Montana Hart, Judicial Clerk
Magistrate Judge Carolyn Ostby
Federal District Court for the District of Montana

This article discusses how blood quantum laws affect racism and other relations between Indian nations and the United States.

1. Introduction

Throughout the history of our country, different levels of “blood quantum” have been required to achieve different levels of status – one drop here, one-half there, and so on. In this way, “[o]ur propensity to sort people into categories has, over the course of history, contributed to immense human suffering.” Depending on the group, its political clout, and the monetary resources at stake, different lines are drawn around or through a group, and only enough “blood” will get you across those different lines. For example, one drop of “black” blood (aka anyone black in your family tree) was enough to make you a member of the “negro” group. However, it took anywhere from one-fourth to one-half “Indian” blood (an Indian parent or a grandparent) to get you into the “Indian” group. In this way, blood quantum has been used to define the boundaries of groups throughout our history.

A closer examination of the history of Indian blood quantum shows, however, that sometimes this boundary drawing was completely arbitrary, based on nothing more than an individual’s appearance. Sometimes the determination of insider/outsider status was also based on the property interest of the powerful class (read: whites). Despite the dubious history of blood quantification, however, the mechanism is still used today by many Indian tribes to determine insider or outsider status. Blood quantum has been adopted by the tribes to determine, for their own purposes, who is considered an Indian and who is not. Thus, blood quantum has been used by tribes to decide tribal membership.

Adoption of blood quantum rules by Indians themselves would be troubling enough, given the imperial and arbitrary history of their early implementation by the U.S. government. What is even more troubling, however, is that even today, blood quantum is used to determine who gets valuable resources – land, money, and preference. Those who are determined, by their blood quantum, to be “Indian” enough are given rights to land, natural recourses, per capita payments, and a number of other valuable assets.

In the United States, however, we have developed a very strong belief in equal protection: no one should be deprived of anything, or get anything extra, based only on the color of their skin, their racial heritage, or their affiliation with a certain group. We take this equality very seriously; people died to make sure that could happen. And yet, Indian tribes today are determining that one tribal member gets a certain amount of government money because they have the right “blood quantum,” while depriving someone who does not have that same “blood quantum” of getting an equal amount of money. To many people, tribal members or otherwise, this determination seems suspect. Given the history of our country, and our tradition of equal protection, should we be suspect of any rule that gives an individual anything on the basis of race alone?

The United States Supreme Court has said, however, that “Indian” is not a racial category. It has determined that Indian blood quantum is a political, rather than a racial determination, and therefore no one is getting anything extra, or being denied anything, based on their race. The Court has carved out Indian blood quantum rules from regular equal protection analysis, and created a troubling legal fiction. By insisting that “Indians” are political, rather than racial beings, the Court ignores both the history and the reality of tribal membership.

This paper argues that this legal fiction is not only absurd, but harmful to Indian interests. Blood quantum is a suspect classification that should be subject to normal equal protection analysis. Part Two of this paper discusses the intellectual concept of “blood quantum” and defines it in the abstract. This discussion and definition show how easily blood quantum rules can be used as arbitrary political tools. Part Three puts this abstract definition into actual historical contexts and shows how Indian blood quantum rules came to exist. The history shows that the rules were based on a disturbing historical precedent, and implemented by the U.S. government with the specific intention of limiting the number of “Indians” who were eligible for land grants. The history also makes it clear that who was determined “Indian” and who was not was the product of a split-second, racial determination by random government officials during a chaotic enrollment process. Part Four shows how, despite the dubious history of blood quantum rules, tribes have increasingly used them to determine tribal membership. Part Five discusses how the U.S. Supreme Court continues to insist that “Indian” is not a racial category, but a political one. The section explains why, in the light of the history and the practical use of blood quantum by tribes today, this is a complete legal fiction.

Part Six discusses why the continued use of blood quantum rules should matter, based on an equal protection analysis. The section explains that maintaining a legal fiction (that “Indian” is not a racial category), actually harms Indian interests, and promotes racism rather than understanding. While blood quantum rules are racial, and should be subject to strict scrutiny, this section also discusses arguments that could be used to overcome that judicial hurdle. The conclusion, in Part Seven, reiterates that discussion about Indian identity, and the benefits or preferences that one can receive as an Indian, should be candidly one of racial distinction. This discussion should also include a justification of policies specifically tailored to advance a compelling tribal and governmental interest in maintaining a trust relationship and righting historical wrongs. If that conversation can occur openly, the racist idea that Indians get special treatment or something for nothing, is addressed head on, and justified through recognizable equal protection standards. This is a far more productive discussion than side-stepping the issue entirely and pretending that race is not a factor in the equation…

Read the entire paper here.

Stand Back Ladies and Gentlemen! The Wonders of the World! Conformity and Confrontation in Winnifred Eaton’s Freak Show Setting in “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid”

Winnifred Eaton Project Symposium
2007-03-15 through 2007-03-16
Owens Art Gallery
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

2007-03-16

Christine Mayor
Mount Allison University

The freak show claims true wonders but encourages fraud, offers multicultural exhibits only to reinforce white supremacy, and asserts authenticity while promoting an exotic and aggrandized racial performance. While many have critiqued Winnifred Eaton’s false persona, questioned her authenticity as an “armchair ethnographer,” and accused her of reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes, this essay will concentrate on her deployment of the freak show in the short story “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid” to challenge widely held American values at the turn of the century. As Pat Shea argues, Eaton’s fiction skilfully balances “concession and resistance,” ensuring commercial success and readership while parodying and subverting white supremacy (19). Eaton capitalises on the potential of the freak show to entice and entertain readers, thus giving her freer reign to critique aspects of the nation, the ideology of whiteness, and the entertainment industry, while playfully exploring her own sideshow hoax as Onoto Watanna.

Historically, the freak show is not simply a form of entertainment, but is also a powerful tool for defining the self through negation, and “allow[s] ordinary people to confront, and master, the most extreme and terrifying forms of Otherness they could imagine” (Adams 2). In the public setting of a sideshow, each audience member is encouraged to identify with the uniform, “normal”, mass, and is distanced from the exotic, disabled, and/or freakishly skilled “Other”. As Robert Bogdan argues,

Americans viewing such displays of non-Western people did not confront their own ethnocentrism…[but]merely [had] confirmed old prejudices and beliefs regarding the separateness of the “enlightened” and “primitive” worlds; they left the freak show reassured of their own superiority by such proofs of others’ inferiority. (197)

…In this manner, Eaton’s image of the freak show may serve as a metaphor for the entertainment industry and a defence of her own passing as Japanese. Eaton, as a mixed-race subject, stands in as a “racial freak” that aggrandizes and exoticises her own identity to gain wider marketability and popularity. Ferens explores in detail Eaton’s conceit of the freak show, stating, “The dime museum may be usefully interpreted as a trope for the popular publishing industry of which Winnifred was, by 1903, a seasoned worker. The two businesses have a similar social function and structure: a metropolitan location, a publisher/manager, a press agent, a stable of expendable writers/performers, and a broad, unsophisticated customer base” (147). The ease with which these two industries can be paralleled further highlights the various ways in which difference is produced and staged to be profitable. Eaton describes in her fiction, the tactics used by the sideshow manager to increase the interest in the acts, which are strikingly similar to the way Eaton packaged herself as an artist. Eaton created for herself a Japanese persona presented through a pen-name, pictures in exotic dress, and authority through racial and familial authenticity. Eaton’s Japanese persona was her commodity and allowed her work to be judged apart from Western literary standards, as, “The naïveté and lack of literary technique that would have disadvantaged her as a white writer suddenly became part of what reviewers recognized as the “peculiar charm” of her untutored style” (Ferens 118). Eaton’s passing thereby allowed her to simultaneously critique and exploit the dominant system, as well as forcing readers to question how we understand and construct the identities of others. Eaton’s playful and cynical arguments that appearances are all that matter in either industry, and that each person must compete as best they can, serve as a critique of the discriminatory American capitalist system and defend her own elaborate hoax…

Read the entire paper here.

Envisioning Chinese Identity and Managing Multiracialism in Singapore

International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference
2009-10-18 through 2009-10-22
Coex, Seoul, Korea
9 pages

Leong Koon Chan, Associate Professor
School of Design Studies
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Multiracialism and bilingualism are key concepts for national ideology and policy in the management of Singapore for nation building. Multiracialism is implemented in social policies to regulate racial harmony in the population of Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other, a social stratification matrix inherited from the British administration. Bilingualism—the teaching and learning of English and the mother tongue in primary and secondary schools—is rationalised as the ‘cultural ballast’ to safeguard Asian identities and values against Western influences. This focus on ‘culture’ as a means of engendering a relationship between the individual and the nation suggests that as a tool for government policy culture is intricately linked to questions of identity. In discussing multiracialism it is necessary to address ethnicity for the two concepts are intertwined.

This paper investigates the crucial role that imagery plays in our understanding of nationalism by examining the policy and process of language reform for the Chinese in Singapore through the visual culture of the Speak Mandarin Campaigns, 1979-2005. Drawing upon object analysis, textual/document analysis and visual interpretation, the research analyses how the graphic communication process is constructed and reconstructed as indices of government and public responses to the meanings of multiracialism and Chineseness.

Central to the findings are Anthony D. Smith’s (1993) contention that “national symbols, customs and ceremonies are the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism,” and Raymond Williams’ (1981) contention that social ideologies are reflective of “structures of feeling”, defined as individual and collective meanings and values, “…with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension…a social experience which is still in process.”

Read the entire paper here.

The History of the Idea of Race… And Why it Matters

Conference: Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Warrenton, Virginia
2007-03-14 through 2007-03-17
9 pages

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

The position taken by many anthropologists, both biological and social, and increasingly many other scholars in the social sciences is that “race is a cultural construct.” It should be clear that this is not a definition or even a characterization of “race,” but an assertion about the scholarly or existential domain in which we can best examine and explain the phenomenon of race. Race should be analyzed as a social/cultural reality that exists in a realm independent of biological or genetic variations. No amount of research into the biophysical or genetic features of individuals or groups will explain the social phenomenon of race. When five white policemen shot a young unarmed African immigrant 41 times in the doorway of his New York apartment, this can’t be explained by examining their genes or biology. Nor can we explain employer preferences for white job applicants or discrimination in housing or any other of the social realities of racism by references to human biological differences.

This does not mean that we deny that there is a biological basis for some human behaviors at the individual level which is a perfectly legitimate perspective for those who are engaged in this kind of research. Nor does it mean that the existence of race as a cultural phenomenon has no impact on the biology of human beings. On the contrary we know a lot about the sometimes devastating effects of race and racism on the biology and behavior of individuals and groups. Because of several hundred years of racism, during which both physical and psychological oppression have characterized the lives and environments of those people seen as members of low status races, differences in health status and life styles among them have appeared and continue to impact all of us.

The significance of History

In the middle of the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to take another look at the beginnings of the American experience. They spent decades exploring all of the original documents relating to the establishment of colonies in America. What these scholars discovered was to transform the writing of American history forever. Their research revealed that our 19th and 20th century ideas and beliefs about races did not in fact exist in the 17th century. Race originated as a folk idea and ideology about human differences; it was a social invention, not a product of science. Historians have documented when, and to a great extent, how race as an ideology came into our culture and our consciousness. This is the story that I will briefly tell here. (One of the first of the publications and perhaps the one with the greatest impact was a book by Edmund Morgan entitled, American Slavery, American Freedom [1975]. It is the detailed story of Virginia, the first successful colony. On its publication it was hailed as a classic that has inspired numerous other historians.)…

…Edmund Morgan wrote, “There is more than a little evidence that Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments” (1975, 327). “It was common for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together” (1975, 327).

No stigma was associated with what we today call intermarriages. Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black men on the Eastern Shore were married to white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather marry a Negro slave on a neighboring plantation than him with all of his property, and she did (P. Morgan 1998). Given the demographics, servant girls had their choice of men. One white widow of a black farmer had no problem with remarrying, this time to a white man. She later sued this second husband, accusing him of squandering the property she had accumulated with her first husband (E. Morgan 1975, 334). In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for her freedom and then married the white lawyer who represented her in court (P. Morgan, 1998)…

Read the entire paper here.

Role of Identity Integration On the Relationship Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment of Multiracial People

Society for Social Work and Research
Sixteenth Annual Conference
“Research That Makes A Difference: Advancing Practice and Shaping Public Policy”
2012-01-11 through 2012-01-15
Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, DC
Saturday, 2012-01-14, 14:30-16:15 EST (Local Time)

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University, Phoenix

Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Rudy Guevarra, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Racial discrimination is a pervasive social problem that has a negative impact on the physical and mental health of ethnic minority groups. Yet few researchers have examined this phenomenon within the growing population of multiracial persons, which according to the 2010 census has dramatically increased by 32% since 2000. This is particularly troubling in lieu of new evidence that multiracial persons may be more vulnerable to racial discrimination and other mental and behavioral health risks. This highlights the need for social workers to understand the risks and strengths associated with multiracial identity and navigating multiple racial and ethnic ties within a racialized society.

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between perceived racial discrimination, multiracial identity integration, and psychological adjustment of diverse multiracial persons.

Three hypotheses guided this study: (1) perceived racial discrimination would negatively correlate with psychological adjustment (i.e., lower depression, anxiety, stress, negative affect, and higher positive affect); (2) individuals with high multiracial identity integration (who identify strongly with two or more racial groups) would positively correlate with psychological adjustment; and (3) strong multiracial identity integration would buffer the effect of perceived racial discrimination on psychological adjustment…

For more information, click here.

Conference Keynote: White Privilege and the Biopolitics of Race

Understanding and Dismantling Privilege
Volume 1, Number 1 (2010)
16 pages
Online ISSN: 2152-1875

10th Annual White Privilege Conference Keynote Address
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Memphis, Tennessee

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Genomics has resurrected scientific interest in biological concepts of race by attempting to identify race at the molecular level. In that last decade, there has been an explosion of biotechnologies that use race as a biological category, such as race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial genetic testing for determining racial identity and genealogy, egg donation and embryo selection involving race, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. These technological innovations are part of a new biopolitics of race that helps to maintain white privilege in the 21st century, post-civil rights era. We must contest both the persistent myth that race is natural and persistent injustices based on race.

…My question is: How is white privilege preserved yet made invisible in the twenty-first century? That’s the tricky thing about white privilege, right? It’s been imbedded in U.S. institutions for centuries and yet many people don’t see it. I think we always have to ask, how is it that white privilege persists today? What is the mechanism that obscures white privilege in our current day and age? What are the forces, the institutions, the ways of thinking that we have to contest? The White Privilege Conference quotes on its flier a brilliant observation by Martin Luther King Jr.: “The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.” But, of course, we can’t remove the cause of the problem if we misdiagnose it. One of the ways that white privilege is perpetuated in this country is by convincing people that it’s natural for white people to have a privileged position in society. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.

Why do many people still believe that white privilege is natural? Why do they think it’s natural that our prisons are filled with black and brown people, that most of the children in foster care are black and brown, and that black and brown people die early deaths? How can all this inequality be natural? One way people are persuaded that inequality is natural is through a misunderstanding of genetics. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton unveiled a working draft of the map of the human genome and famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that, in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” We differ only in a very tiny percentage of our genes. This confirmed the American Anthropological Association statement that race is a social and cultural construction. I would say, race is a political construction. The human species cannot be divided into genetically distinct races. So many scientists and scholars believed that the misunderstanding of race as a biological category had ended. Everyone would realize that all human beings are fundamentally the same. White privilege would disappear because scientists had discovered that these divisions don’t exist at the genetic level. Well, what happened?…

…So what is the origin of race? Is it genetics or is it power? One way to think about it is to ask, is there a genetic test for whiteness? Many genetic researchers focus on people of color and what’s wrong with them. Why do they die at faster rates from so many diseases? Millions of dollars goes into this kind of research seeking the genetic cause for why different groups of people of color are so diseased. But there is not very much attention to this question: What’s the genetic test for white people? If the origin of race is in genetics, we should be able to tell this racial category by the genes.

Well, if there’s a genetic test for whiteness, then tell me who in Barack Obama’s family is white. A family photo from his childhood shows his mother, who is of Irish decent; the Indonesian man she married after she separated from Barack Obama’s father, who’s Kenyan; Barack Obama’s sister, whose parents are Barack Obama’s mother and his stepfather. Who in this picture is definitely white? Apparently, just his mother. But could you tell that from a genetic test? If you test them, Barack Obama and his little sister are the genetic children of a white mother. The only way you can determine that he is black or that she is Asian and not white is to use a political test; there is no genetic test that can decide it. More generally, the only way you can tell who is white is a political test because it is a political category: White means people who are entitled to white privilege. This is a contest that’s gone on in the United States for centuries—who will be included in this category? The answer has nothing to do with genetics. At one point Jewish people were not included in this category. Irish people were not included in this category (Painter, 2010)…

Read the entire keynote here.

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
Selection of papers from a conference held in
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
pages 86-90

Angeline Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts

People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).

So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…

Read the paper here.

 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

Modern Language Studies
Volume 32, Number 2 (Autumn, 2002)
pages 109-138

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea with two of her childhood friends. To the astonishment of the two women, Bellew greets his wife with an unusual pet name: “Nig.” When Clare asks her husband to explain his form of address to the stunned women, he replies, “When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (171). The moment is rich in dramatic irony, for unbeknownst to Bellew, his wife and her two friends are African Americans who are passing as white.

Although Bellew calls his wife “Nig” as a “joke” (171), the interpellation works to erase Clare’s given name, which connotes clearness, light, and whiteness. That Clare responds to this nickname seals the process of subjection. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon notes the power of interpellation to constitute and deform the black body through a racialized naming such as “nigger” or “Negro.” In Fanon’s famous example of racial interpellation, the cry “Look a Negro!” pairs the derogatory naming with the fixing of the look. The simultaneous gaze (“Look”) and naming (“a Negro”) freeze the black man into “an object in the midst of other objects” (109). In Passing, Clare’s husband warns her that if she “don’t look out”—…

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

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