Mixed Race Studies

‘A Chosen Exile’: Black People Passing In White America

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2014-10-07

Karen Grigsby Bates, Correspondent
Culver City, California

Dr. Albert Johnston passed in order to practice medicine. After living as leading citizens in Keene, N.H., the Johnstons revealed their true racial identity, and became national news. (Historical Society of Cheshire County)

Several years ago, Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs was talking with a favorite aunt, who was also the family storyteller. Hobbs learned that she had a distant cousin whom she’d never met nor heard of.

Which is exactly the way the cousin wanted it.

Hobbs’ cousin had been living as white, far away in California, since she’d graduated from high school. This was at the insistence of her mother.

“She was black, but she looked white,” Hobbs said. “And her mother decided it was in her best interest to move far away from Chicago, to Los Angeles, and to assume the life of a white woman.”…

…Hobbs began writing about passing for her doctoral dissertation, and was encouraged to turn it into a book. The dissertation became A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America. It’s a history of passing told through the lens of personal stories…

…Then there’s the sad tale of Elsie Roxborough, a beauty from a distinguished Detroit family who became the first black girl to live in a dorm at the University of Michigan. She tried acting in California, then moved to New York to live as a white woman. When her disapproving father refused to support her, Roxborough — then known as Mona Manet — committed suicide. Her grieving and equally pale sister passed as a white woman to claim the body, so Roxborough’s secret wouldn’t be given away. Her death certificate declared she was white….

Read the article here. Listen to the story (00:04:58) here. Download the story here.

Daughters tell stories of ‘war brides’ despised back home and in the U.S.

The Japan Times
2014-10-05

Lucy Alexander

Hiroko Furukawa was working as a sales assistant at the PX U.S. military supply store in Ginza in 1950 when she met a GI named Samuel Tolbert. Shortly afterwards, Hiroko and Samuel found themselves married and on a train to meet his parents in upstate New York. Hiroko, who came from an upper-class Tokyo family, changed into her best kimono for the occasion, to the horror of her husband, whose family were rural chicken farmers.

“When they arrived at the farm, Samuel’s family stared at Hiroko as if she came from Mars,” explains journalist Lucy Craft. “They made it clear to her that she’d better get into Western clothes. So she did, and she began her life as the wife of a chicken farmer.”

According to Craft, herself the daughter of a Japanese “war bride,” this is one of countless examples of the struggles endured by a despised and largely hidden immigrant group. Craft believes that about 50,000 Japanese women moved to America with their GI husbands after World War II — at that time, the largest-ever migration of Asian women to America.

The 1945 War Brides Act allowed American servicemen who had married abroad to bring their wives to the United States, on top of existing immigration quotas. The trickle of new arrivals became a flood with the passing of the landmark Immigration Act of 1952 that lifted race-based barriers on entering the country.

“Hostility to Japan as a nation meant that Japanese women were the last foreign wives to be allowed to move to the U.S.,” says Craft. “This was a time when interracial marriage was prohibited in many states.”…

Read the entire article here.

Cramblett vs. Midwest Sperm Bank

Marley-Vincent Lindsey
2014-10-07

Marley-Vincent Lindsey

I. Narratives and Political Order

On September 29, Jennifer L. Cramblett filed a suit against the Midwest Sperm Bank for “Wrongful Birth and Breach of Warranty against Defendant.” Where the expecting couple had picked a “blond hair blue-eyed individual” to resemble the non-biological partner, the mix-up had led to the conception of a bi-racial child. The basic grounds for the lawsuit are described in sections eight through sixteen. To summarize, the Sperm Bank had confused two sets of donors: Donor 380 and Donor 330. The confusion is explained in Section 21: “[The Records] are kept in pen and ink. To the person who sent Jennifer vials of sperm in September, 2011, the number “380” looked like “330,” and there are no redundancies to catch errors.”

Simply put, wrongful birth cases are a form of tort in which the claim for damages is based on the cost to parents of raising an “unexpectedly defective child.” Indeed, the term “defective child” is all over the relevant cases. “Wrongful Birth” on a whole has a long history of being associated with the parent’s right to information about their child before carrying it to term. In the words of BGD [Black Girl Dangerous]: “90 percent of fetuses testing positive for Down Syndrome will be aborted in the US. Eugenics cannot be our answer to ableism; advancing disability rights and justice should be.”

I don’t think this perspective ties us to the elimination of wrongful birth entirely. As one of the cases I’ll discuss later demonstrates, there are extreme cases in which a child may never live to see their fifth birthday. On a whole, however, wrongful birth is reflective of a structural consistency within systems to normalize their subjects. One of the many objectives of colonial ontologies is creating environments in which normalcy, through a number of repetitive subjects is preserved, at the cost not only of the value of diversity, but also the ability of subjects to make educated decisions about their own value. This is why I have a very difficult time assessing the development of colonial mentality in colonized subjects, despite the fact that most activists are ready to write such subjects off…

…I further have a specific interest in this regard: as a multi-racial child living with a white mother, I no doubt have a very close experience to what Peyton may know throughout her childhood. It is too easy to dismiss this narrative as simply one in which blackness is imposed on an otherwise white family. I think this is a mistake largely stemming from the structural intent on erasing multi-racial experiences. One only need recall the vitriol a certain Cheerios advertisement met to gain sense of mainstream conception of the mixed family. Calling again, Hardt and Negri, their chapter entitled “Symptoms of Passage” focuses on the irony in the relationship between postmodernism and Empire. Namely, that the former fails by only addressing the symptoms of the problem—the lack of pluralism in contemporary discourse, as an example—and completely misses the cause, which is the passage of power. In light of this chapter, I would suggest that the transition in contemporary race issues has been one in which the liberation movements of the late twentieth century sought to replicate the same power structures without regard to how those power structures would impact others…

Read the entire article here.

Indie Groundbreaking Book: (1)ne Drop

Independent Publisher
October 2014

Craig Manning
Western Michigan University

Landmark Photo Essay Book Seeks to “Shift the Lens on Race”

Has the social and political mindset on race in 2014 changed from where it was 100 years ago? What is the definition of “Blackness” in the modern age? These are just a few of the many questions posed by (1)ne Drop, a landmark new book that seeks to “shift the lens on race” in more ways than one. Written and compiled by Dr. Yaba Blay, Ph. D., a teacher and scholar in the subject of African Studies at Drexel University in Sacramento, CA [Philadelphia, PA], (1)ne Drop is an ambitious project. Part textbook, part photo essay, part academic thesis, (1)ne Drop is also this month’s indie groundbreaking book, and for more reasons than I can list.

On one hand, (1)ne Drop is groundbreaking for shedding a light on the troubling biological basis for much of the racism that has existed in the United States for more than 200 years. That basis is called the “one-drop rule,” a concept that says a person should be identified as “Black” if they have so much as a trace of Black ancestry (or so much as a single drop of Black blood) in their heritage. In the 1900s, the one-drop rule was an actual law, used throughout the southern parts of the country to promote “White racial purity” and overall White supremacy. But while the law is gone, the concept and the thought behind it still persists, and that question of racial identification permeates (1)ne Drop…

Read the entire review here.

Census Bureau Names 10 New Members to National Advisory Committee

United States Census Bureau
Release Number: CB14-186
2014-10-06

Public Information Office
301-763-3030

The U.S. Census Bureau today announced 10 new members to serve on the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations.

The National Advisory Committee advises the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau’s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, advises the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations.

“The expertise of this committee will help us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing statistics about our diverse nation,” Census Bureau Director John H. Thompson said. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee will help ensure that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The 10 new members are:…

…Lily Anne Yumi Welty Tamai, the curator of history at the Japanese American National Museum who is in the final months of a postdoctoral fellowship in critical mixed-race studies at the University of Southern California. She has a doctorate of philosophy in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow…

Read the entire news release here.

What if you were told you were white

All In with Chris Hayes
MSNBC
2014-10-02

Chris Hayes, Host

Lacey Schwartz, Filmaker
“Little White Lie”

But it turns out you’re not. Chris Hayes talks to filmmaker Lacey Schwartz about growing up believing she was white, when in fact, she’s not.

Watch the video here.

More Like Us: How Religious Service Attendance Hinders Interracial Romance

Sociology of Religion
Volume 75, Issue 3 (August 2014)
pages 442-462
DOI: 10.1093/socrel/sru041

Samuel L. Perry
Department of Sociology
University of Chicago

Religious service attendance is a consistently strong predictor of aversion to interracial romance, but intervening social mechanisms at work in this relationship have yet to be explicated. This article examines whether the persistent negative association between religious service attendance and interracial romance is mediated by a preference for religio-cultural endogamy—a form of cultural purity. Multivariate analyses of national-level survey data reveal that persons who believe it is more important that their romantic partner shares their particular religious understandings are less likely to have interracially dated, and that the initially strong effect of religious service attendance on interracial romance is completely mediated by the inclusion of desire for religio-cultural endogamy in regression models. I argue that, because the majority of American congregations are racially homogenous, more frequent attendance hinders interracial romantic engagement by embedding churchgoers within primarily same-race religio-cultural communities, and because congregational embeddedness influences members to seek romantic partners similar to the group, more embedded members are less likely to view different-race persons as sharing their religio-cultural understandings, and thus, as romantic options.

Read or purchase the article here.

Bro. Richard Potter: “The Great Magician”

Scottish Rite Journal
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Supreme Council, 33°
Washington, D.C.
Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A.
March-April 2011

Elliott Saxton, 32°

Bro. Richard Potter [see also here] was the first professional American-born magician and is also credited with being our first successful ventriloquist. His fame was such that the town of Potter Place, New Hampshire, still carries his name. His tricks included dipping his hands into molten lead, crawling through solid logs, and causing men’s hats to speak. Perhaps one of his most famous feats was dancing on a pile of eggs without cracking a single shell.

In November 1811, he joined African Lodge No. 459 of Boston under the premier Grand Lodge of England (Moderns). Richard Potter is named in the June 18, 1827, “Declaration of Independence” of African Lodge as one of three Royal Arch Masons to whom the three signing Past Masters of the lodge delivered the “Grand Charter.” This is the document that created Prince Hall Masonry…

…Richard Potter was born in 1783 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and his mother was a slave named Dinah owned by Sir Charles Frankland, a pre-Boston-Tea-Party tax collector of the Port of Boston. Richard Potter’s paternity was never established, but he was raised by Sir Charles. It is thought that Potter’s father was Frankland’s son.

At the age of ten, he traveled to Britain as a cabin boy with a friend of the family, Captain Skinner. While in England, he decided that a life at sea was not for him and went on his own. He supposedly saw John Rannie, a magician and ventriloquist, perform at an English fair, and soon thereafter he began touring Britain and Europe with Rannie as his assistant. About 1800 Rannie and Potter came to the United States and joined a travelling circus…

…Because of his dark complexion, Potter was often thought to be an American Indian or Hindu, all of which added to his air of mystery. He was described in advertisements as a “Black Yankee”. He sometimes dressed in a turban and performed as an Asian or introduced his wife (accurately) as an American Indian. Potter took full advantage of his perceived exotic appearance and fueled the mystery over the origin of his birth by claiming to be the son of Benjamin Franklin. (Although Bro. Franklin was known to be quite the ladies’ man, he was out of the country at the time of Potter’s conception.)…

Read the entire article here.

Remains will stay in old family cemetery in Bedford

The News & Advance
Lynchburg, Virginia
2014-10-01

Alex Rohr, Beat Reporter

BEDFORD — The remains of at least 20 people buried in Bedford will stay interred despite a request by the Bank of the James to move them.

The bank’s request to the Bedford County Circuit Court, challenged by David Lowry a descendant of former Bedford County plantation owners, was denied after a hearing that lasted about four hours.

The cemetery — which may be the final resting place of slaves — was overgrown with trees and undergrowth when the bank acquired the land in a 2009 foreclosure. The property, just east of Applebee’s on U.S. 460 in Bedford, was covered until March.

Judge James Updike’s decision drew applause from over a dozen members of the extended Lowry family who were present during the hearing…

…Charles Lowry, a witness and relative of James W. Lowry, looked to the heavens in thankful prayer after Updike made his decision.

“God works in mysterious ways,” he said.

Charles Lowry, who is black, and David Lowry, who is white, believe they share ancestors…

…Brent Staples, who has written about his family history for The New York Times editorial page, traces his lineage to the area and a woman named Somerville who birthed several children by Marshall Lowry, a white farm manager.

“As a son of Virginia, and a son of Bedford County and as a descendent of slaves on the Lowry plantation, my concern would be there if they were not blood-related,” Staples said…

…David Lowry, Charles Lowry and Staples said they intend to get DNA tests to verify whether they are related. Combining oral and family history, they are confident the results will be in the affirmative.

“If Somerville’s story is accurate, then I am his cousin,” Staples said on the stand, pointing at David Lowry…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial family embraces twins’ uniqueness

News 10, KXTV
Sacramento, California
2014-10-02

Daria Givens, News 10 Staff

A Lincoln family embodies California’s melting pot and embraces their uniqueness.

LINCOLN – Fraternal twins Viviana and Dennis look very different from each other. They are part of the Ng Family, a multiracial family from all parts of the world.

The twins’ parents Kenika and Ashley Ng also come from multiracial families. Kenika Ng’s is African-American and Hispanic; his father is Hawaiian and Chinese. Ashley Ng is Irish and Hispanic.

Combine their racial make-up, and their children have more of a unique blend. Ten-month-old Viviana, who is four minutes older than her brother, has bright blue eyes and light brown hair like her mother and looks white. Dennis on the other hand, with the big brown eyes and black hair looks like his dad.

Read the entire article and watch the story here.