Mixed Race Studies

The fascist who ‘passed’ for white

The Guardian
2007-04-04

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

Lawrence Dennis was a leading light in the American fascist movement of the 1930s. He was a fan of Hitler and a self-avowed anti-semite. Now a new book reveals that he was actually black—although even his wife didn’t know. Gary Younge reports

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America’s bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black. It turns out that the man Life magazine once described as “America’s number one intellectual fascist” was, in fact, a light-skinned African American, born in the segregated South—although he “passed” for white among the greatest race hatemongers known to mankind.

In a new book, The Colour of Fascism, Gerald Horne reveals how Dennis managed to live a lie for his entire adult life. “It’s not clear that his wife knew that he was black,” says Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston. “He certainly never told his daughter. When she asked him, he would just smile enigmatically.”…

…”Passing” was common in American society at the time. Despite laws against miscegenation, the pervasive practice of masters raping their slaves had produced a large number of light-skinned people. Under America’s rigidly enforced codes of racial supremacy, any child of a mixed-race relationship was deemed “black”, regardless of their complexion. They called it the one-drop rule: one drop of “black blood” made you black…

Read the entire article here.

Beginnings of Miscegenation of Whites and Blacks

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 3, Number 4 (October 1918)
pages 336-453

Carter G. Woodson, Founder

Although science has uprooted the theory, a number of writers are loath to give up the contention that the white race is superior to others, as it is still hoped that the Caucasian race may be preserved in its purity, especially so far as it means miscegenation with the blacks. But there are others who express doubt that the integrity of the dominant race has been maintained.[442] Scholars have for centuries differed as to the composition of the mixed breed stock constituting the Mediterranean race and especially about that in Egypt and the Barbary States. In that part of the dark continent many inhabitants have certain characteristics which are more Caucasian than negroid and have achieved more than investigators have been willing to consider the civilization of the Negro. It is clear, however, that although the people of northern Africa cannot be classed as Negroes, being bounded on the south by the masses of African blacks, they have so generally mixed their blood with that of the blacks that in many parts they are no nearer to any white stock than the Negroes of the United States.

This miscegenation, to be sure, increased toward the[Pg 336] south into central Africa, but it has extended also to the north and east into Asia and Europe. Traces of Negro blood have been found in the Malay States, India and Polynesia. In the Arabian Peninsula it has been so extensive as to constitute a large group there called the Arabised Negroes. But most significant of all has been the invasion of Europe by persons of African blood. Professor Sergi leads one to conclude that the ancient Pelasgii were of African origin or probably the descendants of the race which settled northern Africa and southern Europe, and are therefore due credit for the achievements of the early Greek and Italian civilizations.[443]

There is much evidence of a further extension of this infusion in the Mediterranean world.

“Recent discoveries made in the vicinity of the principality of Monaco and others in Italy and western France,” says MacDonald, “would seem to reveal … the actual fact that many thousand years ago a negroid race had penetrated through Italy into France, leaving traces at the present day in the physiognomy of the peoples of southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and western France, and even in the western parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. There are even at the present day some examples of the Keltiberian peoples of western Scotland, southern and western Wales, southern and western Ireland, of distinctly negroid aspect, and in whose ancestry there is no indication whatever of any connection with the West Indies or with Modern Africa. Still more marked is this feature in the peoples of southern and western France and of the other parts of the Mediterranean already mentioned.”[444]

Because of the temperament of the Portugese this infusion of African blood was still more striking in their country. As the Portugese are a good-natured people void of race hate they did not dread the miscegenation of the races. One finds in southern Portugal a “strong Moorish, North African element” and also an “old intermixture with those[Pg 337] Negroes who were imported thither from Northwest Africa to till the scantily populated southern provinces.”[445] This miscegenation among the Portugese easily extended to the New World. Then followed the story of the Caramarii, the descendants of the Portugese, who after being shipwrecked near Bahia arose to prominence among the Tupinambo Indians and produced a clan of half-castes by taking to himself numerous native women.[446] This admixture served as a stepping stone to the assimilation of the Negroes when they came…

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Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany

Peter Lang
2008
168 pages
ISBN 978-1-4331-0278-3 (paperback)

Ika Hügel-Marshall (Translated by Elizabeth Gaffney)

Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II. As an “occupation baby”, born in a small German town in 1947, Ika has a double stigma: Not only has she been born out of wedlock, but she is also Black. Although loved by her mother, Ika’s experiences with German society’s reaction to her skin color resonate with the insidiousness of racism, thus instilling in her a longing to meet her biological father. When she is seven, the state places her into a church-affiliated orphanage far away from where her mother, sister, and stepfather live. She is exposed to the scorn and cruelty of the nuns entrusted with her care. Despite the institutionalized racism, Ika overcomes these hurdles, and finally, when she is in her forties, she locates her father with the help of a good friend and discovers that she has a loving family in Chicago.

Rutgers Student, a German ‘Brown Baby,’ Helps Others Search for their Identities and Creates Community

Focus: News for and about Rutgers faculty, students, and staff
Rutgers University
2012-05-01

Carrie Stetler

She grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, as Wanda Lynn Haymon, the only child of an African-American mother and father who made her feel special and loved.
 
But when relatives whispered at family gatherings, she knew they were talking about her. One day she asked her parents if she was adopted.
 
 “Do you feel adopted?’’ they answered.
 
She did, but had no proof until 1994 when Wanda Lynn discovered that she was born Rosemarie Larey in Viernheim, Germany, the daughter of a black soldier and German mother. Although she was born in 1956, just 11 years earlier, Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent some of the estimated 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps. Many were subject to medical experiments or were forcibly sterilized. Others simply disappeared.
 
After the war, the stigma of bearing a bi-racial child was so great that many mothers brought their children to orphanages, which often placed them with African-American families in the United States.
 
Today, Rosemarie Pena  (her married name) is completing her master’s degree at the Rutgers-Camden, in the Department of Childhood Studies, researching the history of “brown babies,’’ as they were known at the time of their birth, as well as people who identify as Afro-German around the world.
 
Pena also heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey, an academic organization that connects Afro-Germans internationally. Its mission is to document and inform others about black Germans and their history. For post-war adoptees like Pena, the society helps them find closure and connects them with others who share their experience…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location

Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies
Temple University

The African German Experience: Critical Essays
Greenwood Publishing
1997

edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay

The leitmotif of the German society in regards to African people has a lot to do with the way Germans approach racial difference. Thus, the German society, in many ways, similar to that of other European nations views Africans as other and lesser. This is a particularly troubling problem for children of mixed heritage since in the German construction of social reality they cannot be German by blood and therefore are African, the other.

It is claimed in this essay that the Afro-Germans, those born of African fathers and German mothers or German fathers and African mothers, a less frequent combination, have a peculiar problem of cultural location which is unlike the problems of other residents of Germany. There is a relatively sizable population of immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the former Yugoslavia who reside In Germany. But while Turks, Italians, and Greeks may be defined as not-German they are still seen in the light of their own nationality, but to which nation is the Afro-German connected? This is at once an existential and a locational question for the Afro-German, encompassing being and physical place…

Read the entire chapter here.

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

James Blackwood Paternoster Row
1857
198 pages

Mary Seacole (1805-1881)

Mary Seacole was born a free black woman in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century. In her long and varied life, she travelled in Central America, Russia, and Europe; found work as an inn-keeper and as a ‘doctress’ during the Crimean War; and became a famed heroine, the author of her own biography, in Britain. As this work shows, Mary Seacole had a sharp instinct for hypocrisy as well as ripe taste for sarcasm. Frequently we see her joyfully rise to mock the limitations artificially imposed on her as a black woman. She emerges from her writings as an individual with a zest for travel, adventure, and independence, a stimulating and inspiring figure.

Read the entire book here.

Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

The National
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
2012-09-01

Piotr Zalewski

No one knows how many Afro-Turks there are but, in a country that’s beginning to acknowledge its great diversity, they’re beginning to unearth their forgotten history.

In 1961, Ertekin Azerturk, a Turkish businessman from Istanbul, placed a long-distance call. The voice of the switchboard operator who answered—a woman’s voice, sweet and crisp, like a singer’s—must have made his head spin. Must have, because from that day on, Azerturk insisted on speaking to the same operator each time he picked up the phone. During one call he found the gumption to ask his mystery girl out on a date. Her reply was as surprising to him as his request was to her. “No way,” Tomris, the operator, told Azerturk. “You won’t like me,” she explained, “because I’m dark.”

But Azerturk didn’t back down and Tomris eventually gave in. When they met, he was dumbstruck. He had understood Tomris was dark, but had never figured she would be black. (He had never previously met or even heard of a Turk who was.) Tomris was, like her voice, striking, and Azerturk was smitten. Over the Azerturk family’s objections, the pair married.

…As a child, Muge could not fully grasp why her skin was the colour it was—or why it should matter. She finally learnt, and understood, the truth in her teens. She and her brother were descendants, three generations removed, of black slaves…

Read the entire article here.

BlackAtlas and Laura Izibor in Dublin, Ireland

BlackAtlas
American Airlines
2012-09-28

Laura Izibor, Singer/Songwriter

Singer/Songwriter Laura Izibor explores multicultural Dublin, Ireland through her eyes.  Featured are Temple Bar area, the pubs, the Guinness factory, the Grand Canal, the Royal Canal and a statue of Phil Lynott (the only African-Irish statue in Ireland).

Diversity triumph in 2010 Rose of Tralee

The African Voice: Ireland’s No. 1 African Community Newspaper
2010-09-05

Zélie Asava

Dr. Zélie Asava considers the contest’s celebration of the ‘new Irish’

2010 marks the year that the Rose of Tralee was won by a woman of Irish and Indian heritage. Clare Kambamettu, a mixed-race psychologist, took the title as the London rose, making it the 2nd year a London Rose has won the competition. There have been few mixed-race Roses to date. Luzveminda O’Sullivan was the 1998 rose of Tralee (whose name is mysteriously misspelt or replaced by another on many websites listing the history of the Roses). Though O’Sullivan hails from Mayo she was the Phillippines Rose, reflecting her Irish-Filipino identity. 2004’s Philadelphia Rose, Sinead De Roiste, was the first Irish-African American contestant in the history of the Rose of Tralee.

The fact that a mixed-race Rose can now be included in the competition, and even go on to win it, as a representative of Irish women and culture, is a wonderful example of diversity working in this country. Interestingly though, Kambamettu’s heritage has not been mentioned by much of the national media, with journalists preferring to describe her as “stunning” or refer to her father’s mildly exotic name, Ravi, as a signifier of her Otherness, rather than state her as mixed-race…

Read the entire article here.

From Colour-Blindness to Recognition? Political Paths to New Identity Practices in Brazil and France

Prepared for presentation at the conference:
Le multiculturalisme a-t-il un avenir?
Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University
2010-02-26 through 2010-02-27
25 pages

Karen Bird, Associate Professor of Political Science
McMaster University, Canada

Jessica Franklin
Department of Political Science
McMaster University, Canada

For decades, both France and Brazil officially denied the existence of race and, by extension, racism. France, with its republican and universalist normative framework, insisted on a political project of assimilative integration and non-differentiation among citizens in the public sphere. Race and ethnicity, in this regard, were not merely suspect but politically and normatively illegitimate categories. Despite the significant role of colonialization and immigration in modern French social history, the theme of ethnic and racial relations would remain taboo in both political discourse and social science research until the late-1990s. Brazil, on the other hand, constructed itself as a nation representing the idea of a “racial democracy.” In a progressive fashion since the abolition of slavery, racial mixing and harmonious racial relations became a central pillar of Brazilian democracy. They were held to be so amply developed as to provide no room for racial discrimination. Despite these official paradigms of colour-blindness, both France and Brazil have taken significant steps in recent years towards recognizing ethnic difference and combating structures of racist discrimination. This paper examines the emergence of the theme of race and ethnicity in public discourse and public policies in France and Brazil, looking at similarities and differences in the political pathways of transformation across the two countries.

Read the entire paper here.