Mixed Race Studies

Race and Ethnicity in Society: The Changing Landscape, 3rd Edition

Cengage Learning
2012
480 pages
ISBN-10: 1111519536; ISBN-13: 9781111519537

Edited by

Elizabeth Higginbotham, Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Criminology
University of Delaware

Margaret L. Andersen, Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Sociology
University of Delaware

This engaging reader is organized in four major thematic parts, subdivided into thirteen different sections. Part I (“The Social Basis of Race and Ethnicity”) establishes the analytical frameworks that are now being used to think about race in society. The section examines the social construction of race and ethnicity as concepts and experience. Part II (“Continuity and Change: How We Got Here and What It Means”) explores both the historical patterns of inclusion and exclusion that have established racial and ethnic inequality, while also explaining some of the contemporary changes that are shaping contemporary racial and ethnic relations. Part III (“Race and Social Institutions”) examines the major institutional structures in contemporary society and investigates patterns of racial inequality within these institutions. Persistent inequality in the labor market and in patterns of community, residential, and educational segregation continue to shape the life chances of different groups. Part IV (“Building a Just Society”) concludes the book by looking at both large-scale contexts of change, such as those reflected in the movement to elect the first African American president.

• Major themes include coverage showing the diversity of experiences that now constitute “race” in the United States; teaching students the significance of race as a socially constructed system of social relations; showing the connection between different racial identities and the social structure of race; understanding how racism works as a belief system rooted in societal institutions; providing a social structural analysis of racial inequality; providing a historical perspective on how the racial order has emerged and how it is maintained; examining how people have contested the dominant racial order; exploring current strategies for building a just multiracial society.
• Each section includes several pages of analysis that outline the main concepts to be covered, providing a clear initial roadmap for reading and a convenient resource students can use with assignments and while preparing for exams.
• The text’s unique organization according to overarching themes and relevant subtopics, including identity, social construction of race, why race matters, inequality, and segregation, places the articles into a broader context to promote greater understanding.
• This innovative text looks beyond a simple black/white dichotomy and focuses more broadly on an extremely wide range of ethnic groups, providing a much more realistic and useful exploration of key topics that is more relevant and compelling for today’s diverse student population.

Table of Contents

• PART I: THE SOCIAL BASIS OF RACE AND ETHINICITY
  • 1. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 1. Howard F. Taylor, “Defining Race”
    • 2. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., “The Race Myth”
    • 3. Abby Ferber, “Planting the Seed: The Invention of Race”
    • 4. Karen Brodkin, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?”
    • 5. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “On Racial Formation”—Student Exercises
  • 2. What Do You Think? Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Racism
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 6. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, “American Racism in the Twenty-First Century”
    • 7. Charles A. Gallagher, “Color-Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post Race America”
    • 8. Judith Ortiz Cofer, “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria”
    • 9. Rainier Spencer, “Mixed Race Chic”
    • 10. Rebekah Nathan, “What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student”—Student Exercises
  • 3. Representing Race and Ethnicity: The Media and Popular Culture
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 11. Craig Watkins, “Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism”
    • 12. Fatimah N. Muhammed, “How to NOT Be 21st Century Venus Hottentots”
    • 13. Rosie Molinary, “María de la Barbie”
    • 14. Charles Springwood and C. Richard King, “‘Playing Indian’: Why Native American Mascots Must End”
    • 15. Jennifer C. Mueller, Danielle Dirks, and Leslie Houts Picca, “Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Order”—Student Exercises
  • 4. Who Are You? Race and Identity
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 16. Beverly Tatum, interview with John O’Neil, “Why are the Black Kids Sitting Together?”
    • 17. Priscilla Chan, “Drawing the Boundaries”
    • 18. Michael Omi and Taeku Lee, “Barack Like Me: Our First Asian American President”
    • 19. Tim Wise, “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son”—Student Exercises
• PART II: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE: HOW WE GOT HERE AND WHAT IT MEANS
  • 5. Who Belongs? Race, Rights, and Citizenship
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 20. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequality”
    • 21. C. Matthew Snipp, “The First Americans: American Indians”
    • 22. Susan M. Akram and Kevin R. Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law After September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims”
    • 23. Peggy Levitt, “Salsa and Ketchup: Transnational Migrants Saddle Two Worlds”—Student Exercises
  • 6. The Changing Face of America: Immigration
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 24. Mae M. Ngai, “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America”
    • 25. Nancy Foner, “From Ellis Island to JFK: Education in New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration”
    • 26. Charles Hirschman and Douglas S. Massey, “Places and Peoples: The New American Mosaic”
    • 27. Pew Research Center, “Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America”—Student Exercises
  • 7. Exploring Intersections: Race, Class, Gender and Inequality
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 28. Patricia Hill Collins, “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection”
    • 29. Yen Le Espiritu, “Theorizing Race, Gender, and Class”
    • 30. Roberta Coles and Charles Green, “The Myth of the Missing Black Father”
    • 31. Nikki Jones, “From Good to Ghetto”
    • 32. Gladys García-Lopez and Denise A. Segura, “‘They Are Testing You All the Time’: Negotiating Dual Femininities among Chicana Attorneys”—Student Exercises
• PART III: RACE AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
  • 8. Race and the Workplace
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 33. William Julius Wilson, “Toward a Framework for Understanding Forces that Contribute to or Reinforce Racial Inequality”
    • 34. Deirdre A. Royster, “Race and The Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs”
    • 35. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Families on the Frontier”.
    • 36. Angela Stuesse, “Race, Migration and Labor Control”—Student Exercises
  • 9. Shaping Lives and Love: Race, Families, and Communities
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 37. Joe R. Feagin and Karyn D. McKinney, ”The Family and Community Costs of Racism”
    • 38. Dorothy Roberts, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare”
    • 39. Kumiko Nemoto, “Interracial Relationships: Discourses and Images”
    • 40. Zhenchao Qian, “Breaking the Last Taboo: Interracial Marriage in America”—Student Exercises
  • 10. How We Live and Learn: Segregation, Housing, and Education
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 41. John E. Farley and Gregory D. Squires, “Fences and Neighbors: Segregation in the 21st Century”
    • 42. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe”
    • 43. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, “Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies”
    • 44. Heather Beth Johnson and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools: Race and the ‘Good Choices’ of White Families”—Student Exercises
  • 11. Do We Care? Race, Health Care and the Environment
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 45. H. Jack Geiger, “Health Disparities: What Do We Know? What Do We Need to Know? What Should We Do?”
    • 46. Shirley A. Hill, “Cultural Images and the Health of African American Women”
    • 47. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, “Poisoning the Planet: The Struggle for Environmental Justice”
    • 48. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, “Race, Place and the Environment”—Student Exercises
  • 12. Criminal Injustice? Courts, Crime, and the Law
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 49. Bruce Western, “Punishment and Inequality”
    • 50. Rubén Rumbaut, Roberto Gonzales, Goinaz Kamaie, and Charlie V. Moran, “Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment among First and Second Generation Young Men”
    • 51. Christina Swarns, “The Uneven Scales of Capital Justice”
    • 52. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record”—Student Exercises
• PART IV: BUILDING A JUST SOCIETY
  • 13. Moving Forward: Analysis and Social Action
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 53. Thomas F. Pettigrew, “Post-Racism? Putting Obama’s Victory in Perspective”
    • 54. Frank Dobbins, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly, “Diversity Management in Corporate America”
    • 55. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Ways to Fight Hate”—Student Exercises

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

The New Press
Fall 2002
496 pages
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-56584-773-6

Kenneth R. Janken, Professor, African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

A publishing landmark, the first biography of the man who brought the NAACP to national prominence

From his earliest years, Walter White was determined to transcend the rigid boundaries of segregation-era America. An African American of exceptionally light complexion, White went undercover as a young man to expose the depredations of Southern lynch mobs. As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 until his death in 1955, White was among the nation’s preeminent champions of civil rights, leading influential national campaigns against lynching, segregation in the military, and racism in Hollywood movies.

White is portrayed here for the first time in his full complexity, a man whose physical appearance enabled him to negotiate two very different worlds in segregated America, yet who saw himself above all as an organization man, “Mr. NAACP.” Deeply researched and richly documented, White’s biography provides a revealing vantage point from which to view the leading political and cultural figures of his time—including W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Weldon Johnson—and an unrivaled glimpse into the contentious world of civil rights politics and activism in the pre–civil rights era.

THE CONGRESS: Black’s White

TIME Magazine
1938-01-24

To Negro Lee Jones, a 31-year-old mill-hand of Greensboro, Ala., last week’s doings in the U. S. Senate were good news. Negro Jones had been arrested, charged with jumping on the running board of a car to kidnap Mrs. Robert Knox Greene, wife of a white planter. When Mrs. Greene’s friends began to gather he did not need to be told what familiar, ugly thought they had in mind. At the crucial moment when Sheriff Calvin Hollis was trying to calm the crowd, up stepped Planter Robert Knox Greene himself. How Planter Greene, a cousin of Alabama’s Representative Sam Hobbs, persuaded the mob to disperse he was soon explaining to the Associated Press. “I told them I was the aggrieved person,” said he, with some self-satisfaction, “and I ought to have the final say. I also reminded them our Southern Senators were fighting an anti-lynching bill in Washington and violence might hamper them…

…But Jimmy Byrnes dropped the first real bomb. Pointing straight at a small man seated quietly in the gallery, his voice tense with passion, the wiry South Carolinian cried: “The South may just as well know , . . that it has been deserted by the Democrats of the North. . . . One Negro . . . has ordered this bill to pass and if a majority can pass it, it will pass. . . . If Walter White,” and Jimmy Byrnes was fairly shouting his angry tribute, “should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

Paleface-The Negro who did not acknowledge this extraordinary attention was Secretary Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Not the least reason for Southern hatred of antilynching bills is that for the past decade they have been inextricably associated with Walter White, and that the gradual growth of the anti-lynching movement had by last week made spunky, dapper, 44-year-old Negro White the most potent leader of his race in the U. S.

Son of a fair-skinned Georgia postman and his fair-skinned wife, Walter White is blond and palefaced. He himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64. But despite a skin that last week fooled fellow guests at Washington’s Hay-Adams House, Walter White has always regarded himself as a Negro. He remembers that his father’s house was almost burned down during an Atlanta race riot in his childhood. He recalls too that his father died in agony when the surgeons of the white ward of an Atlanta hospital, to which he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, balked upon learning his race and insisted on shipping him in the rain to the Negro ward across the street…

…In 1935, Walter White was able to get the ear of Franklin Roosevelt. Secretary Marvin Mclntyre refused him an appointment with the President, but the President’s Negro Valet Irvin H. McDuffie who sometimes leaves notes on his employer’s pillow and tactfully gets unofficial callers in through the White House kitchen, was able to arrange a private meeting. What effect Walter White’s address to the President may have had Washington last week was not sure…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Class in Political Science

Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Volume 11, Issue 1 (Fall 2005)
pages 99-114

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Derrida versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure.
 
This paper examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. I then briefly discuss my own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. I conclude that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.

Introduction
 
The discipline of political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the underlying driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, mainstream (disproportionately White) scholars tend to focus on structural conditions such as laws or the economy, the self-interest of leaders or activists, political incentives, or even geography in order to explain ethnic identification and conflict. Conversely, scholars who study racial politics (disproportionately people of color), tend to start from racial or ethnic identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions, understandings of self-interest, or political incentives. This generalization, like most, is indeed too crude, and one can immediately identify exceptions; but, it is arguably accurate enough to be a good starting point for further exploration. I develop this argument, with reference to the most prominent work of political scientists in several subfields, in the next two sections below.
 
Few political scientists, and even fewer in mainstream, high-status departments, focus on discourse analysis growing out of continental European philosophy. Most who do are political philosophers whose central mission does not include explaining empirical phenomena. As a result, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Derrida versus Marx than around DuBois versus Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities offered in a given political structure.
 
This paper begins by examining and illuminating that proposition through discussion of important recent work by political scientists. I then briefly discuss my own prior work on the relationship between race and class, and use my current research to illuminate how tensions between identity-based politics and interest-based politics play out in academic political science as well as in actual political arenas. I conclude roughly where Richard Delgado does: that material forces and access to resources drive most significant political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is most fully understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses…

…Multiracialism shows some of the same effects. The values placed on multiracial identity are at present completely mixed, even contradictory and mutually hostile. Some people of color (and Whites) embrace the new politics and culture of multiracialism as a means of breaking down the old rigid color lines, as a way to enable people to recognize and identify with their full heritage, as a necessity for good medical care, or as a new frontier for civil rights advocacy. Others see the embrace of multiracialism as merely one more attempt by outsiders to undermine Black or Hispanic solidarity, as a strategy to disrupt litigation or legislation around civil rights, voting rights, and employment discrimination, or as an underhanded way to distance oneself from Blackness (or Latino identity). Still others see it as a pragmatic reality, given rates of immigration and intermarriage, that political actors must accommodate as well as they can. Regardless of how one feels about it, there is growing evidence that the fact of being multiracial has important consequences for one’s life chances. For example, the socioecononomic status of biracial children fall consistently between those of their lower status parent and those of their higher status parent. Thus, on the one hand, the fact of having mixed racial or ethnic ancestry has real, material, consequences for one’s life – independent of the language with which we understand that fact. But on the other hand, the growth of and contestation around a multiracial movement show that the mere fact of having parents of different races is politically and personally very different from the claim of a multiracial identity and community…

Read the entire essay here.

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Gender & History
Volume 21, Issue 3 (November 2009)
pages 628–646
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01567.x

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working-class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain’s port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.

[Excerpted from the chapter of the same name in the anthology, Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return]

As the First World War came to a close, ‘black’ men from Britain’s overseas colonies and their white wives and lovers came to embody the fears and anxieties that gripped Britain’s economically depressed port cities. Black men were accused of taking jobs from white British men and stealing ‘their’ women. White women who partnered with black men were cast as depraved and immoral traitors, who selfishly prioritised their own sexual and material desires above the good of the nation. Working-class inter-racial couples became targets of abuse on the increasingly tense streets of Britain’s port cities and, when a series of violent race riots swept through the ports in the summer of 1919. they were largely blamed for their outbreak.  White mobs, ranging in size from a few hundred to several thousand, indiscriminately attacked black men, harassed and assaulted their white partners, and destroyed the multiracial settlements they called home. In the wake of the riots, some of these couples attempted to leave their hostile environs for the British colonies, especially in West Africa and the West Indies, where many of the men in question came from. Their desire to take up residency overseas, however, led lo the immediate implementation of a policy which I call the ‘policy of prevention’, designed to keep European women married to working-class black men out of the colonies. This was especially the case for British West Africa and marked an important shift from the prewar period, when colonial social conventions and their attendant racial taboos were the primary mechanisms that, at the very least, kept European women and black men from openly liaising with one another. During the interwar period, state power was also used to ensure that the West African colonies were kept free of such couples.

While the origins of the policy of prevention are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the 1919 race riots, it continued to guide colonial authorities’ decision-making processes throughout the interwar years. By and large, it was West African men who were domiciled in Britain and married to white British women that sought in the decision-making processes of colonial authorities. It also demonstrates that in contrast to settler colonial regimes, in places like Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, the administered colonies of British West Africa stopped short of implementing the most draconian forms of sexual segregation through the use of anti-miscegenation laws and barbaric extralegal measures such as lynching. Rather, to keep the colonies free of all but a handful of wealthy inter-racial couples, colonial authorities used a combination of strategies, including denying passports to the white wives of working-class African men, refusing to pay the cost of their passage to West Africa, and classifying them as ‘undesirable immigrants’ under the provisions of the colonies’ Immigration Restriction Ordinance. While not the focus of this chapter, these strategics were complemented by earlier but comparatively less vigilant efforts on the part of colonial administrators to bring an end to the far more frequent occurrence of sexual relationships between European colonial officers and African women through the use of official anti-concubinage circulars during the early twentieth century.’ This in turn helps to underscore the importance of paying attention to the spectrum of colonial anxieties that accompanied the gendered, racial and spatial configurations of mixed race couples, as well as the forms (illicit, casual, marital) their relationships took. Indeed, if we are to use panic and bureaucratic strong-arming as yardsticks, preventing European officers from cohabiting with African women was a far less pressing issue than keeping lawfully married working-class black men and white women out of the colonies.

Reflecting on the deep-seated anxieties surrounding the existence of inter-racial unions between black men and white women during the interwar years in Britain, Lucy Bland usefully suggests that, if we are to fully understand the complexity of inter-racial relationships during this period, we must undertake the difficult work of documenting the voices of the ‘women and men who negotiated their personal and sexual relationships in the face of a barrage of both official and cultural hostility’, while paying particularly close attention to ‘their experiences, the impact of prejudice upon them, and their strategies of survival and support’. Foregrounding their experiences in our analysis of the colonial archive provides a more complete view of the various worlds these couples were attempting to negotiate. Laura Tabili has done just this by charting the thwarted struggles of a handful of British and mixed-race British-Somali women to make the British Protectorate of Somaliland their home in the face of the exclusionary practices of colonial authorities who believed that the presence of these women living intimately among ‘native’ populations posed a ‘threat to colonial, racial and gendered hierarchies, and British credibility’. In what follows, I also take up Bland’s mandate and in so doing provide a broader historical context, indeed the precedent for understanding Tabili’s work on British Somaliland, by looking at the history of mixed-race couples who sought to make home in British West Africa during the interwar years.

Riots, repatriation and the policy of prevention

Although black communities and mixed marriages in Britain long predate the First World War. during the war itself increasing numbers of black seamen came to its ports from different parts of the world to fill the labour vacuum in the shipping industry that resulted from the drafting of white British men into the military. The majority of these seamen originated from Britain’s colonies in the West Indies and West Africa, as well as from India, the British Somaliland Protectorate and Aden. While seamen from India, known as tascars, had always made up a significant number of the colonised labour hired on British vessels, the contracts they were hired under greatly restricted their ability to reside in Britain; as a result, settlement rates were highest among seamen from the West Indies. West Africa, Somaliland and Aden. Ethnic settlement patterns differed from port to port; for instance, Liverpool was inhabited’ mostly by West Indians and West Africans, while Cardiff had a higher percentage of men from Aden and Somaliland. At the close of the war, most of these men, along with considerable numbers of demobilised soldiers from Ihe colonies, remained in the country’s seafaring districts. Together, they competed with white British men for an increasingly limited number of maritime jobs.

Economic hardship in the ports, created by the post-war depression and racialiscd job competition within the shipping industry, offers a compelling explanation of the underlying cause of the riots. In Jacqueline Jenkinson’s study of the 1919 riots, she examines a series of smaller riots between January 1919 and the outbreak of major rioting in June and finds that in each of the cases racial violence was a direct result of competition over jobs. Moreover, the initial incidence of racial violence that led to the outbreak of rioting in Liverpool in June was attribuied to tensions between black seamen and white foreign labour, in this case Scandinavians, who were in direct competition with each other for jobs not already taken by white British seamen. Yet it was the notion that black men were consorting with white women that garnered the most attention from the press, local and national authorities, as well as everyday observers. The ‘sex problem’, as one newspaper dubbed it. became a primary explanatory framework for understanding, and in many cases rationalising, the impetus behind the riots. The attention given to the ‘sex problem’ by contemporary observers, including policy makers, suggests that, in addition to job competition, anxieties over race and sex played an important role in the move towards proposing repatriation as an appropriate solution to the social and economic problems deemed responsible for the riots. Indeed, within days of the major outbreak of violence in June, local and national authorities began drawing up plans to repatriate black men to the colonics in an attempt to restore calm and order (and more specifically, racial order) to the port cities. The Colonial Office, however, feared that if the repatriations were handled inappropriately, they would cause instability by returning disgruntled men to the colonies. Disturbances had already broken out in Sierra Leone as early as July 1919 over the ill-treatment of black men in the British ports.” How much more unrest could be expected if the victims of the riots, many of whom had participated in the war effort, were forcibly returned to the colonies?

Anxious about the stability of the West African colonies, the Colonial Office not only insisted that the repatriation scheme be voluntary, it was also equally adamant that the white wives of ‘natives’ should be prevented at all costs from going to West Africa with their husbands. In fact, rioting had barely come lo a stop in June 1919, and the Colonial Office had already decided to refuse repatriation facilities to black men who insisted on returning with their white wives. Given that the men in question had no funds to repatriate themselves, let alone their wives, by refusing to pay passage fees, British authorities effectively made it impossible for black men who desired joint repatriation to return lo the colonies with their white wives. On 30 July 1919, this policy was solidified during a meeting at the Ministry of Labour, which had assumed responsibility for Ihe repatriation scheme. At the special insistence of the Colonial Office, the Ministry of Labour instructed the local committees responsible for facilitating the scheme in the seven main ports (Salford, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Hull, South Shields and London), not to repatriate black men with their white wives. As one Colonial Office adviser later put it, the ‘white wife problem’ was, as the phrase suggests, particular to white women. This is underscored by the fact that the government agreed to pay the cost of repatriating the few black men, like Joseph Queashie from the Gold Coast, who were married lo black women. It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of West Africans and their white wives who were adversely affected by this policy, but the statistical information available suggests that their numbers were by no means negligible. In a survey conducted by the Liverpool Police shortly after the riots, a total of 188 men from British West Africa were identified as residing in Liverpool. The police, however, suspected that the actual number was much higher and suggested that the lower number reported was the result of ‘an exodus of negroes from the city to inland towns since the question of repatriation arose’ and added that ‘those who have not left are probably in hiding’. As Table 1 indicates, of the 188 West African men identified, twenty-one were married, eighteen of these to white women resident in Liverpool and three to African women who resided in West Africa. Of the eighteen men married lo white women, eleven were willing t0 be repatriated back to West Africa with their white wives.

The willingness of 50 per cent of married West Africans to accept repatriation compared to 47 per cent of single West Africans indicates that the authorities were wrong in believing that marriage to white women created ties to the metropole that could not be broken as easily as those of single men. Rather, it was the authorities” policy of prevention that kept these men in Britain because it barred them from returning to the colonies with their wives. Thus, if we are to understand fully the range of different imperatives that shaped the unwillingness of West Africans to be repatriated and ultimately led to the schemes’ widely recognised failure, we must acknowledge that, in addition to unsatisfactory remuneration packages and Ihe desire, indeed the right to remain in Britain, for some West Africans the policy of prevention was also a major factor. A representative from the Local Government Board said as much when he expressed his belief that “the white wife constituted a big difficulty.” The Colonial Office’s refusal to repatriate West Africans with their white wives contrasts sharply with its concession to allow black men from other parts of the British Empire, namely West Indians, to return home with their white wives at the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Regulating Race: Interracial Relationships, Community, and Law in Jim Crow Alabama

University of Georgia
2008
96 pages

L. Kathryn Tucker

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

This thesis, based largely on legal cases concerning miscegenation in Alabama, argues that legal efforts to impose social control by prohibiting interracial marriages and relationships proved ineffective due to the efforts of defendants to find legal loopholes, the racial ambiguity of a tri-racial society, and the reluctance of many communities to prosecute offenders. Nationwide interest in matters of race fueled the passage of one-drop laws in the 1920s, but also provided defendants with ways to claim racial backgrounds that fell outside the scope of the laws. Concurrently, local communities proved disinclined to prosecute interracial relationships unless individuals felt personally involved through desires for revenge or monetary gain. This often long-term toleration of interracial relationships, along with interracial couples’ own efforts to escape prosecution, proves that southern race relations were often more flexible and accommodating than harsh laws and the attitudes behind them would suggest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER
  • 1. Miscegenation and the Law
  • 2. Patterns of Defense
  • 3. Defining Race
  • 4. Community Toleration
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
  • A. Map of Alabama Counties
  • B. Alabama Miscegenation Cases, 1883-1938
  • C. Alabama Appellate Miscegenation Cases 1865-1970
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…Much of the difficulties that the courts faced in determining race, even by physical means, stemmed from the defendants’ own attempts at muddling the issues. By the 1920s, most blacks came from families that at some point had experienced racial mixture—whether by choice or by force—and many white families, contrary to their fervent beliefs, also had racially mixed forebears. Savvy defendants in miscegenation cases used this fact to their benefit, claiming ancestors who variously possessed Spanish, Indian, or the ambiguous “Creole” or “Cajun” blood in order to explain dark skin tones. This defense proved particularly valuable in states such as Alabama, where the legislatures never outlawed marriage between Indians and whites. Closely linked to attempts to define race based on physical characteristics of both defendants and families, attempts to explain away ambiguous features based on Indian heritage often proved successful….

Read the entire thesis here.

Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 7, Issue 3-4, 2008
pages 145-169
DOI: 10.1080/15299710802170771

Jacqueline Battalora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Saint Xavier University, Orland Park, Illinois

This article is concerned with epistemology and the assertion of supremacy. Focusing on the resources deployed to make marriage restrictions logical, this article investigates their descriptive and structural underpinnings. I juxtapose support for the Defense of Marriage Act and Federal Marriage Amendment with antimiscegenation case law and examine descriptions of fact, the patterns they shape, and the underlying structure that holds them together. These laws are an arena of contestation not only over policy choices but over God and nature, and ultimately difference. I pay attention to the ways in which constructions of difference work to exclude and erase and I argue that these laws share a common structure of supremacy. Dualistic constructions of difference work to erase those whose bodies threaten the clear lines that justify exclusion by law. Those who are multiracial, where whiteness is a contributor, and those who are bisexual represent such a threat to racial marriage bans on the one hand and same sex marriage bans on the other. The formula of difference-making, erasure, and supremacy in law has important implications not only for challenging marriage restrictions today but to measure future law and policy.

Read or purchase the article here.

The “Common Sense” of Race

Southern California Law Review
Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010)
pages 441-452

Neil Gotanda, Professor of Law
Western State University College of Law, Fullerton California

In What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, Ariela J. Gross provides a compelling and nuanced account of race in America. Through her examination of “racial trials”—litigation in which racial identification plays a crucial role—Gross ties together the personal, social, and political dimensions of racial identity and classification. This discussion provides an important new perspective on the study of race in this country.

Earlier studies of racial classification have focused on the meanings of statutory racial categories. Gross, however, centers her analysis on the formation and reaffirmation of racial categories as a primarily social process. Gross draws from numerous racial trials—spanning slavery in the antebellum South to modern-day Mexican Americans grappling with “whiteness”—in order to survey the origins and history of “black” and “white” as categories in American life.

Read the entire essay here.

Race, Blood, and What the Alligator Knows: A Review of What Blood Won’t Tell

Southern California Law Review
Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010)
pages 425-440

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

From the opening pages of Ariela J. Gross’s What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, it is clear that the reader is about to embark on something special. The story begins in a Louisiana courthouse in 1857, with an enslaved woman named Alexina Morrison claiming that she is white. For her contemporaries, the assertion no doubt carried troubling implications. James White, the man who insisted Morrison was black, had papers to prove that he paid good money for her and that she was his property. But her “blue eyes and flaxen hair” told a different story, and her recent appearances at public balls in Jefferson Parish had convinced a number of residents that her graceful mannerisms and affectations were those of a white woman rather than slave. The courtroom was soon bombarded with a dizzying array of evidence for such a simple question—was she white or was she black?—with men eventually stripping her to the waist to examine her body for the tiniest signs of her true identity. Three trials later, the community still had not resolved the issue. But more importantly, from Gross‘s view, this case provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine the complex and constantly shifting ground of race and its import for this nation‘s history…

Read the entire essay here.

Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma

University of California Press
March 2002
267 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520230972

Circe Dawn Sturm, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

• Finalist in the Non-fiction category of the Oklahoma Book Awards, Oklahoma Center for the Book
• 2002 Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History, Oklahoma Historical Society

Circe Sturm takes a bold and original approach to one of the most highly charged and important issues in the United States today: race and national identity. Focusing on the Oklahoma Cherokee, she examines how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed, and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race. Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among Cherokee citizens from full blood to 1/256, but today the range is far greater—from full blood to 1/2048. This trend raises questions about the symbolic significance of blood and the degree to which blood connections can stretch and still carry a sense of legitimacy. It also raises questions about how much racial blending can occur before Cherokees cease to be identified as a distinct people and what danger is posed to Cherokee sovereignty if the federal government continues to identify Cherokees and other Native Americans on a racial basis. Combining contemporary ethnography and ethnohistory, Sturm’s sophisticated and insightful analysis probes the intersection of race and national identity, the process of nation formation, and the dangers in linking racial and national identities.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One. Opening
• Chapter Two. Blood, Culture, and Race: Cherokee Politics and Identity in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter Three. Race as Nation, Race as Blood Quantum: The Racial Politics of Cherokee Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Four. Law of Blood, Politics of Nation: The Political Foundations of Racial Rule in the Cherokee Nation, 1907-2000
• Chapter Five. Social Classification and Racial Contestation: Local Non-National Interpretations of Cherokee Identity
• Chapter Six. Blood and Marriage: The Interplay of Kinship, Race, and Power in Traditional Cherokee Communities
• Chapter Seven. Challenging the Color Line: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen
• Chapter Eight. Closing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index