Mixed Race Studies

Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia

University of Virginia Press
November 2008
312 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Cloth ISBN: 9780813927558
Ebook ISBN: 9780813930343

Gregory Michael Dorr, Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Amherst College

Blending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia’s various cultures of segregation—rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female, and black from white and Native American. Famously articulated by Thomas Jefferson, ideas about biological inequalities among groups evolved throughout the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, proponents of eugenics—the “science” of racial improvement–melded evolutionary biology and incipient genetics with long-standing cultural racism. The resulting theories, taught to generations of Virginia high school, college, and medical students, became social policy as Virginia legislators passed eugenic marriage and sterilization statutes. The enforcement of these laws victimized men and women labeled “feebleminded,” African Americans, and Native Americans for over forty years. However, this is much more than the story of majority agents dominating minority subjects. Although white elites were the first to champion eugenics, by the 1910s African American Virginians were advancing their own hereditarian ideas, creating an effective counter-narrative to white scientific racism. Ultimately, segregation’s science contained the seeds of biological determinism’s undoing, realized through the civil, women’s, Native American, and welfare rights movements. Of interest to historians, educators, biologists, physicians, and social workers, this study reminds readers that science is socially constructed; the syllogism “Science is objective; objective things are moral; therefore science is moral” remains as potentially dangerous and misleading today as it was in the past.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “You Are Your Brother’s Keeper!”
• 1. “The Sacrifice of a Race” Virginia’s Proto-eugenicists Survey Humanity
• 2. “Rearing the Human Thoroughbred” Progressive Era Eugenics in Virginia
• 3. “Defending the Thin Red Line” Academics and Eugenics
• 4. “Sterilize the Misfits Promptly” Virginia Controls the Feebleminded
• 5. “Mongrel Virginians” Eugenics and the “Race Question”
• 6. “A Healthier and Happier America” Persistent Eugenics in Virginia
• 7. “They Saw Black All Over” Eugenics, Massive Resistance, and Punitive Sterilization
• Conclusion: “I Never Knew What They’d Done with Me”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Crimes of Passion: The Regulation of Interracial Sex in Washington, 1855-1950

Gonzaga Law Review
Volume 47, Issue 2 (Symposium: Race and Criminal Justice in the West) April, 2012
pages 393-428

Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law
Gonzaga University School of Law

Race had not mattered to Harvey Creasman and Caroline Paul. The two had lived together as husband and wife for seven years, beginning in 1939.  Harvey was black and Caroline was white, but like other couples, they found that they shared things in common and enjoyed each other’s company.  They met in church in Seattle, Washington.  Soon after, they started living together at Harvey’s rental unit in the working-class town of Bremerton, across Puget Sound from Seattle, before scraping together enough money to buy a home.  They sold Harvey’s 1931 Plymouth automobile to make their down payment and put the title in Caroline’s name, as Harvey had suffered some discrimination at the hands of a realtor and was too put off to deal with the situation.  Friends said the house was more of a “shack,” but over the years a combination of frugality and hard work allowed them to fix the place up nicely.  Harvey did a lot of the work himself, and Caroline helped take care of it, using Harvey’s paychecks from the Naval Yard to purchase furniture and pay the mortgage.  Unfortunately for Harvey, however, Caroline’s death in 1946 brought more than a loss in companionship, because Caroline’s daughter by her previous marriage believed that most everything Harvey and Caroline had built over the years, including the house, belonged to her, not Harvey. And she was right: in an opinion teeming with racial implications, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that, because Harvey and Caroline had never formalized their marriage, all of the property purchased in Caroline’s name belonged to the white daughter rather than the black spouse.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. “SOONER OR LATER THE TIDE OF FEMALE EMIGRATION WILL SET IN”
• II. “WE DO NOT . . . FAVOR[] AMALGAMATION”
• III. “DISTINCTIONS BASED UPON COLOR”
• IV. “THEY LIVE[D] TOGETHER AS HUSBAND AND WIFE”
• V. “SWAN ANDERSON AND THIS INDIAN WOMAN WERE NEVER MARRIED”
• CONCLUSION

Race had not mattered to Harvey Creasman and Caroline Paul. The two had lived together as husband and wife for seven years, beginning in 1939.  Harvey was black and Caroline was white, but like other couples, they found that they shared things in common and enjoyed each other’s company.  They met in church in Seattle, Washington.  Soon after, they started living together at Harvey’s rental unit in the working-class town of Bremerton, across Puget Sound from Seattle, before scraping together enough money to buy a home.  They sold Harvey’s 1931 Plymouth automobile to make their down payment and put the title in Caroline’s name, as Harvey had suffered some discrimination at the hands of a realtor and was too put off to deal with the situation.  Friends said the house was more of a “shack,” but over the years a combination of frugality and hard work allowed them to fix the place up nicely.  Harvey did a lot of the work himself, and Caroline helped take care of it, using Harvey’s paychecks from the Naval Yard to purchase furniture and pay the mortgage.  Unfortunately for Harvey, however, Caroline’s death in 1946 brought more than a loss in companionship, because Caroline’s daughter by her previous marriage believed that most everything Harvey and Caroline had built over the years, including the house, belonged to her, not Harvey. And she was right: in an opinion teeming with racial implications, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that, because Harvey and Caroline had never formalized their marriage, all of the property purchased in Caroline’s name belonged to the white daughter rather than the black spouse.

Harvey and Caroline’s story, together with others like it, adds a crucial piece to our understanding of the regulation of interracial sex and marriage in this country’s past. Prior to Loving v. Virginia, virtually every state in the Union outlawed the practice at some point, with much of the South singling out whites and African Americans in their prohibitions, and the West adding other disfavored races to the list. Early scholarship picked up on the valuable insight these laws provided into whites’ ideologies, noting how they served the dual purpose of maintaining white racial purity while at the same time protecting white patriarchal privilege through lax enforcement. More recent scholarship has dug deeper, exploring the spaces where interracial fraternization took place and studying those involved to help better understand the significance of race and sex at various times and places. Out of the growing number, a handful have been especially good at looking beyond the rigid lines drawn in the statutes, as these laws were of a type destined to be broken.

Yet, as this impressive list of scholarship grows, the topic of interracial relationships in the State of Washington remains considerably understudied. The explanation is undoubtedly because, with the exception of the years between 1855 and 1868, there were no laws criminalizing interracial marriages. The state thus seems relatively unimportant precisely because it appeared more progressive. But such thinking is simplistic or, worse, dangerous. It mistakenly assumes that the topic was not controversial—it was—and, more importantly, it causes us to miss out on the nuances of race and race relations in the state and region.

This article strives to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the regulation of interracial sex and marriage in the State of Washington from its time as a territory through the first half of the twentieth century. In light of the area’s history and settlement patterns, the focus is not limited to blacks and whites, but instead takes into account relationships between whites and other racial groups. The article’s main thesis is that, although the criminal bans on the practice were short-lived, Washington elites and power-brokers used legal mechanisms to discourage and penalize interracial families in much the same way. The result of these efforts may not have been prison time; but, as Harvey Creasman’s case demonstrates, lawyers and judges regularly used the law to ensure that wealth and property remained in the hands of whites rather than racial minorities. In doing so, the legal system became an effective deterrent to interracial relationships, perpetuating existing notions of race that privileged whiteness over other racial groups.

Part I of this article introduces the narrative used to explore this thesis. The story involves Swan Anderson, and it begins by recreating the demographics and general environment Swan encountered when he arrived in the Washington Territory in the nineteenth century. This Part also introduces the relationship that Swan developed with Mary, a Native American woman. Part II follows up on this background by situating the passage of the area’s antimiscegenation laws within the larger desire of Euro-American settlers to create a white utopia. Part III then examines the repeal of these laws during the Reconstruction era, and contrasts these legal changes with the continuing desire to keep the races separate well into the twentieth century. Part IV refocuses the narrative back to Swan and Mary, exploring in detail the evidence and arguments raised in an inheritance dispute in which Swan and Mary’s daughter attempted to prove her parents were husband and wife. Finally, Part V examines the verdict and aftermath of the case, in which decision-makers ruled against the daughter and continued to privilege white ideals and discount the views of people of color. The article concludes by tying together Harvey Creasman’s case with this one, and notes that, far from being unique, these stories reflect strongly held assumptions that disadvantaged interracial couples and racial minorities in the state…

…The desire to maintain a white utopia similarly kept the Asian population in check. The Chinese began emigrating to the West in the 1840s during the California gold rush. In the ensuing decades, opportunities in mining, lumber, and the railroads brought them further north. Still, restrictive policies and discriminatory practices meant that their numbers were never very large. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was not limited to Washington; but it carried the unmistakable message that, like the laws banning free people of color forty years earlier, non-whites were not part of the community Washingtonians hoped to build. In 1880, the number of Chinese in Washington stood at a mere 3,260, or less than half a percent of the population, compared to 75,132 in California. The number of Japanese was even smaller. Despite growing numbers in the West, the census counted one Japanese person in Washington in 1880 and only 360 in 1890.

For those steeped in the ideologies of the time, even this was too many. While anti-Chinese sentiment was by no means limited to Washington, events indicate that it was just as strong there as elsewhere. “The civilization of the Pacific Coast cannot exist half Caucasian and half Mongolian,” warned the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in September 1885. “The sooner the people of the United States realize this and take measures to make certain that the Caucasian civilization will prevail, the sooner discontent will be allayed and the outbreaks will cease.” The editorial was prescient. The day it appeared, twenty miles southeast of Seattle, a group of whites chased Chinese coal miners from their homes and burned their property…

…Two years later, in the next legislative session, Senator Earl Maxwell picked up the cause. Like Representative Todd, Senator Maxwell also said a local event prompted his actions, yet his justification played off the same deep-seated racial fears that prompted earlier efforts. What brought the matter to his attention, he said, was a “14-year-old Seattle girl marrying a 38-year-old negro . . . .” As with Jack Johnson, the message was clear: black men were dangerous, and white women—particularly someone as young and innocent as this one—needed the State’s protection.

This bill would eventually fail, as would the other two bills introduced by Senator Maxwell in the subsequent sessions of 1939 and 1941. Men like Lieutenant Governor Victor Meyers, a champion of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, helped muster the votes to defeat them. But credit also rests with racial progressives and civil rights activists. Horace Cayton, the African American editor of the Seattle Republican, was an early and strong voice of opposition. He regularly attacked whites pushing for anti-miscegenation laws as hypocritical, insisting in 1909 that “[i]f the white man desires to prevent race miscegenation let he himself put up the fence and then observe it.” The black community also organized against the 1935 bill, forming the Colored Citizens’ Committee in Opposition to the Anti-Intermarriage Bill. Churches and other organizations, including the NAACP, also spoke out against the efforts. An editorial published in the Northwest Enterprise, Seattle’s African American newspaper, perhaps summed it up best when it lambasted the 1937 law: “With love as old as the world, and marriage, love’s goal, a sacred institution upon which the nation is propagated, any law which denies legitimacy to childhood is demoralizing to the people of the State, and any law which is discriminatory in character, is dastardly and derogatory to true American principals [sic].”

It was messages like these that provided the necessary encouragements for couples of different races to remain together. Like elsewhere, getting a handle on the number who crossed the color line in Washington is a difficult task. George Bush, an early African American pioneer, had a white wife. They were a highly successful family, appearing in the 1860 census records together with five children and an estate worth over $8000. Ten years later, George and Elizabeth Oulst from King County appear in the census, together with Commons and Mary Nix from Pierce County, each one an interracial couple consisting of a white person and a person of African descent…

Read the entire article here.

We the “White”” People: Race, Culture, and the Virginia Constitution of 1902

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
September 2003
92 pages

Jeremy Boggs

In 1902. in an effort to reestablish what they saw as whites’ natural right to control government rule over blacks, the delegates to Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 declared the new constitution law that they felt reflected “the true opinion of the people of Virginia.” This thesis argues that while Virginia’s 1902 Constitution increased the political power of whites and decreased that of black Virginians, the reasons why they needed the document in the first place highlights an important aspect regarding the anxiety of many white Virginians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, it helps to show how whiteness as a source of political and social power was not concrete or absolute, but rather was a reaction to the increasing presence and assertion of power by black Virginians. I argue that white Virginians, faced with the increasing political and social presence of black Virginians as equals, sought to reestablish their racial superiority through law and constitutional revision. However, by making their whiteness “visible”—by continually reasserting their claim to legitimate power because they were “white”—white Virginians revealed how unstable their racial world had become.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Combating the “Peril of Negro Domination”
• A New Emancipation
• “To Purify, Exalt, and Ennoble”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Curriculum Vitae

Read the entire thesis here.

Racial Classification in Assisted Reproduction

Yale Law Journal
Volume 118, Issue 8 (June 2009)
pages 1844-1898

Dov Fox, Academic Law Research Fellow
Georgetown University Law Center

This Note considers the moral status of practices that facilitate parental selection of sperm donors according to race. Arguments about intentions and consequences cannot convincingly explain the race-conscious design of donor catalogs. This prompts us to examine the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination. Even practices marked by innocent motives and benign effects can give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. Race-based differentiation in voting ballots, dating websites, and donor catalogs helps us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Race and reproduction
  • A. Free Market Sperm Donation
  • B. Race-Conscious Donor Catalogs
• II. the expressive dimension of racial discrimination
  • A. Discriminatory Intent and Discriminatory Effects
  • B. Discriminatory Expression
• III. the moral logic of donor classification
  • A. The Social Meaning of Reproducing Race
  • B. The Architecture of Reproductive Choice
• Conclusion

Introduction

Few choices matter more to us than those we make about the person with whom we will share a life or start a family. When having children involves assisted reproduction, selecting an egg or sperm donor occasions similar gravity. Such decisions typically bring to bear a patchwork of preferences about the particular physique, disposition, or values we find desirable in a romantic or procreative partner. To many, race matters. Just as some people in the search for companionship are looking for a significant other who shares their racial background, many of those who wish to become parents would prefer a child whose racial features resemble their own.

To help those who use donor insemination have a child of a particular race, sperm banks routinely catalog sperm donors on racial grounds. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight sperm banks operating in the United States provide aspiring parents with information about donor skin color, and the largest banks organize sperm donor directories into discrete sections on the basis of race. This practice of race-conscious donor classification invites us to rethink those racial preferences we commonly take for granted within intimate spheres of association. Insofar as race tends to reproduce itself within the family unit, race-conscious donor decisionmaking serves as a promising point of departure from which to ask whether and how our multiracial democracy should seek to preserve or diminish our collective self-identification with racial solidarities.

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the practice of racial classification by the world’s largest sperm bank. Part II argues that antidiscrimination arguments about bad intentions and bad consequences struggle to make sense of the race-conscious way that sperm banks design donor catalogs and online search functions. This suggests that certain classes of discriminatory behavior require a richer moral vocabulary than traditional frameworks allow. In these cases, we do well to examine what might be called the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination, which turns on whether a rule or action instantiates public values that characteristically erode worthy forms of social recognition.

Part III works out the social meaning of racial classification in assisted reproduction by reference to similar classifications in the more familiar settings of voting and dating. These analogies help us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. This Part argues that racial classifications marked by innocent motives and benign effects give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive-choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Read the entire article here.

Letters from a Planter’s Daughter: Understanding Freedom and Independence in the Life of Susanna Townsend (1853-1869)

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
Volume 12  (Spring 2012)
pages 145-174

R. Isabela Morales

Wealthy Alabama cotton planter Samuel Townsend had already fathered eight children by the time Susanna Townsend was born in 1853—her mother, like all the mothers of her half-brothers and sisters, was an enslaved African-American woman on one of Samuel Townsend’s large plantations. Samuel’s fourth daughter and youngest child, Susanna was a vulnerable young girl born into the turmoil and turbulence surrounding the probation and execution of Samuel Townsend’s will when, to the shock of his white relatives, Samuel left the bulk of his $200,000 estate to his nine enslaved children. Susanna, seven years old when she and her extended family were emancipated, may have remembered little of the courtroom drama that ended in 1860, when the Probate Court of Madison County declared Samuel’s will valid. But the nominally favorable courtroom ruling did not mark the end of Susanna’s liminal existence. Until her death, Susanna Townsend lived in a borderland of race, class, and family status. A reconstruction and examination of a life (1853-1869) that straddled the Civil War provides insight into meanings of freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency in the post-emancipation moment—as well as revealing interactions of gender, race, and power in the creation of the archive.

Mr Cabaniss i write to you in haste, Susanna began in her letter of 4 June 1868. There was a man in Cincinnati, the nicest young man i ever did see, who wished to have her for a wife, and if Cabaniss could simply send her some money for a dress and shoes (common enough apparel, for she was very plain in dressing), and if he would pay their train fare to Kansas, Susanna could marry the man within the month. She did not want a large wedding—no church service at all, in fact—but would take her vows in the mayor’s office and be off to her new life as fast and far as the train cars could take her. If Alabama lawyer S.D. Cabaniss, executor of her father’s estate, would only write her by the tenth of June, Susanna would be ready, for her fiancé was in a hury to move. He was a gentleman, fifteen-year-old Susanna Townsend assured her attorney, and also, she added almost as an afterthought, he is a white man.

Susanna’s wishes were modest: a simple gown for a simple wedding ceremony, a husband who says he will [do] his best for me as long as he lives, a small sum of money out of her inheritance to visit her extended family in Leavenworth County and buy a little house in Kansas if there is no more than three rooms and an acre of grown [ground]. The attorney Cabaniss owed Susanna twelve thousand dollars out of her father Samuel Townsend’s property—Samuel, a wealthy cotton planter from Madison County, Alabama, had bequeathed his $200,000 estate to Susanna, her eight elder siblings, and their mothers in 1856. On paper, at least, Susanna was a privileged young woman with every opportunity. In reality, her future was far less certain.

Susanna Townsend was a former slave living and working in Reconstruction-era urban Ohio, the daughter of the white planter Samuel and the fourth of his seven enslaved African-American mistresses. The Civil War had drastically devalued the Townsend property, and neither Susanna nor any of her half-siblings would ever receive a quarter, if that, of their inheritance in the following years. She was mixed-race—perhaps, as a Freedman’s Bureau agent later said of her half-sister Milcha, “the woman is nearly white”—but whether or not her appearance could fool Cincinnati society, her father’s attorney knew she was the daughter of an enslaved woman. If S.D. Cabaniss replied to Susanna’s  June letter, the archive holds no record; he certainly never sent money by the tenth of that month. In five months, Susanna would give birth in her half-brother Wesley’s home outside of the city—a hint at her urgency to marry and leave the state. In another six, Susanna would be dead.

In her sixteen years, Susanna straddled slavery and freedom, the antebellum South and the post-war Northwest, a life of in-between’s on the borderlands of race and society. She had an uncertain place within the extended Townsend family: as the youngest child with no living parents and no full siblings, she could neither support herself independently nor depend on her extended family supporting her indefinitely. She had an uncertain inheritance: when the Civil War broke out, the new Confederate government prohibited Cabaniss, living in Alabama, from sending any money into the Union. For Susanna, this ban meant serious financial insecurity. Finally, she had an uncertain racial status within the society at large. Because she was a “white-looking” woman of some promised financial means, Susanna upset categories of a social hierarchy that equated African ancestry with powerlessness and inferiority. Despite these potential advantages, as a fifteen-year-old mixed-race girl, Susanna remained subject to the machinations of the senior white lawyer. Occupying these in-between spaces meant a life of inherent instability—poignantly expressed in her letter of 4 June, in which she explains her young man’s offer of marriage and promise of security: He says I have been going around long enough without anyone to take care of me.” The liminality of her circumstances drew Susanna Townsend to this seemingly desperate point in the summer of 1868, when vistas of possibility for her future could be opened or closed by a single stroke of her lawyer’s pen.

In fiction, all tragedy has meaning. But what meaning can be drawn from the life and death of a teenage girl like Susanna Townsend? Her time was short, a fleeting sixteen years easy to overlook in the contemporary convulsions of war and the national drama of Reconstruction. Her biography is not so extraordinary; she was neither the only child of sex across the color line or the only mixed-race woman who would attempt to “pass” across that line. Nine letters in her own words exist, both on fragile paper in a university manuscript library and in high-quality pixels online, but still she is elusive. Susanna’s letters reveal only pieces of her mind—the pieces she deliberately crafted for the eyes of her father’s attorney. What was Susanna truly thinking, hoping, and wishing for when she wrote to Cabaniss on 4 June 1868? What is at stake when we speculate? And for us of the twenty-first century, does it even matter? The significance of Susanna Townsend’s story lies in these very questions: this micro history is as much about the problems and impossibilities of reconstructing Susanna’s life as it is about Susanna herself. This story fits into the existing historiography in that it is a gendered analysis of her life in urban Ohio during Reconstruction. Its specificities, however, raise new questions about freedom in this particular socio-historical context. Her letters and words, evasive as they may be, are a lens through which to draw inferences about how the daughter and former slave of an Alabama cotton planter understood her emancipation, pursued independence and self-sufficiency, and exercised her freedom on the borderlands of society…

Read the entire article here.

The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods

Communication Theory
Volume 22, Issue 1 (February 2012)
pages 92–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01399.x

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Washington, Seattle

This article advocates for the interdisciplinary use of critical race theory and critical rhetorical theory in communication to analyze racialized language and to evaluate the cultural and political significance of new racial discourses in the United States. The article examines the dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and the congressional hearings on the Tiger Woods Bill (1997), two key instances of public debate over multiracial categories. The article then turns to Tiger Woods’ term “Cablinasian” and the possibilities of an alternative and contestory multiracial nomenclature, shifting the critique away from Woods’ celebrity or politics and toward the legal history and rhetorical potential of the word itself.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez

Boston College Third World Law Journal
Volume 20, Issue 2 (May 2000)
pages 231-289

Reginald Leamon Robinson, Professor of Law
Howard University

In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement’s paradigm shifting possibilities.

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Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
December 1996
303 pages

Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
• CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
• CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

Read the entire thesis here.

Daniel Sharfstein wins 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Vanderbilt Law School News
Vanderbilt University
2012-03-16

Daniel Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for his sensitive account of the fine line people of mixed race have tread in the United States since the nation’s beginning, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011).
 
“[The Invisible Line] makes real the fact that, not so long ago, American citizens were forced into hiding their lineage and identity just to live free in this democracy, the perils and sense of loss, no matter which road they chose, and the price being paid even to this day by their descendants, and by extension, all of us,” the judges said in a press release issued by Columbia and Harvard universities.
 
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, established in 1998 in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist J. Anthony Lukas, is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognizes excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of its namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. Sharfstein will receive the award prize of $10,000 on May 1, 2012, at a ceremony at Harvard University.

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Sharfstein chronicles the history of three African American families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities, starting in the 17th century. The book is a result of Sharfstein’s research on the legal history of race in the United States and on dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their racial identity and create new lives. He found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans and document their migration across the racial divide…

Read the entire new release here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

The Penguin Press
2011-02-17
416 pages
6.14 x 9.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.

In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Three American families’ stories…

The Gibsons
The Gibsons were among the first free people of color in seventeenth-century Virginia, most of whom were free because their mothers were English and by law slavery followed the status of the mother. In the early l700s, as Virginia’s laws made it increasingly difficult for free blacks to own property and earn a living, the Gibsons left the colony for the southern frontier. When the Gibsons reached South Carolina in the 1730s, the colonial assembly worried.that they had come to organize a slave revolt. But after personally interviewing the family, the colonial governor granted them hundreds of acres of land in a Welsh and Scots-Irish community. After one generation they were neither black nor white-they were planters. In the nineteenth century, they rose to the heights of the Southern aristocracy. They sent their sons to Yale and had vast holdings of land and slaves near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lexington, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Gibsons were rebel officers, powerful opponents of Reconstruction, and leaders of the New South.’ One became a United States Senator from Louisiana.

The Spencers
The Spencers’ story begins in the Appalachian Mountains. In an area that had more slaves and more free blacks than anywhere else in eastern Kentucky-largely because of a bustling salt mining industry there in the early 1800s-two free men of color began having children with a pair of white sisters who had recently moved from South Carolina. Shortly before one man, George Freeman, was prosecuted for interracial sex, the other man, Jordan Spencer-possibly Freeman’s brother or son-moved with his family one hundred miles deeper into the mountains. Even though he was visibly dark-skinned, his new community in Johnson County, Kentucky, decided that he could be white. His family hovered on the line between black and white for the rest of the century, farming and logging in a mountain hollow before heading into the coal mines.

The Walls
The Walls trace their roots to a wealthy plantation owner in Rockingham, North Carolina. Stephen Wall never married, but he had children with three of his slaves, In the 1830s and 1 840s, he freed his children and sent them to Ohio to be raised by radical Quaker abolitionists. He bought land for them, generously supported their education at places like Oberlin College, and willed them a lot of money. No one knows why. He kept their mothers in bondage. The children became ardent abolitionists and served in the Union Army and Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War, several moved to Washington, D.C., where they fought for civil rights and women’s rights and raised their families to expect nothing less than equality. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, their children disappeared into the white world.