Mixed Race Studies

Black and White Medicine

PsycCRITIQUES
Volume 58, Number 32 (August 2013)
5 pages

Alejandra Suarez, Professor of Psychology
Antioch University, Seattle

A review of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age by Jonathan Kahn New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013. 311 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-16298-2 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-231-53127-6 (e-book), hardcover.

What is your race? (a) Mestizo, (b) Greek, (c) Creole, (d) Peninsular, (e) Mulatto, (f) Quadroon, (g) Octoroon, (h) Indian, (i) Chinese, (j) Japanese, (k) Moor, (l) Syrian, or (m) Nubian? In another time and place, these may have been the available choices. Obviously these categories are not anthropologically or scientifically based.

Currently the United States uses the definition of racial categories as published by the Office of Management and Budget (1997) in its Revised Directive 15. Directive 15 stems from the civil rights movement; it aims to provide consistent data and a uniform language in order to increase fairness in society. All federally funded research with human participants is required to address issues of race, although the OMB explicitly states that its categories are not anthropologically or scientifically based.

The current racial choices in the United States are (a) American Indian or Alaska Native, (b) Asian, (c) Black or African American, (d) Native Hawaiian or other PacificIslander, and (e) White. There are two categories for data on ethnicity: (a) Hispanic or Latino and (b) not Hispanic or Latino (Office of Management and Budget, 1997). Many people objected that it is difficult to fit into these categories, so in the 2000 census, one could also self-select multiple categories of race/ethnicity. Selecting one’s race is complicated: It is about identities; it is not about genetic differences.

The human genome project, completed in June 2000, concluded that all human beings, regardless of race, have pretty much the same genes. In fact, the American Anthropological Association has asserted that race is “a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior” and that “racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into ‘racial’ categories” (American Anthropological Association, 1998, para. 8, and cited in book under review, p. 40).

Race is an ideology that changes according to time and place. However, at the same time that the human genome project has unequivocally demonstrated that race is a construct with no biological validity, the idea of race as a genetically based population variant is becoming more and more entrenched in biomedical research and practice. How is it possible?…

Read the entire review here.

Racial profiling in medicine

Nature Medicine
Volume 19, Number 7 (July 2013)
page 808
DOI: 10.1038/nm.3254

Aravinda Chakravarti, Professor of Medicine
McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, Columbia University Press, 2012. 28 pp., ISBN: 0231162987

The field of human genetics is moving beyond using genomics as a tool for deeper understanding of human disease pathophysiology to the possibility of translating this knowledge for efficient treatment. A particular emphasis is being placed on Individualized medicine’, promising to tailor treatment based on each of our genomes. This ideal vision, however, can cause unease when our notions of genetic individuality intersect with those of ancestry and race. Jonathan Kahn’s book, Race in a Bottle, is a contemporary medical story born of this nexus. In it, he skillfully uses the story of the drug BiDil, a therapeutic for heart failure marketed specifically for African Americans (but whose use has declined markedly because it provides no unique benefit in comparison to similar drugs), as the backdrop for examining the expanding role of race in medical genomics, even when the same science has called the existence of race into serious doubt.

As Kahn highlights in the book, the innocuous birth of BiDil in 1992 was no predictor of its contorted history. BiDil is a combination of two vasodilators, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate (H-I), which are presumed to act through the nitric oxide pathway to provide benefit to patients with congestive heart failure. They were combined into one pill for easier administration, although each was already available in generic form. Between 1980 and 1991, two major clinical trials in the United States, involving patients of both European and African ancestries, clearly established that angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors should be the preferred drug for patients with heart failure and that the H-1 combination should be used in individuals who did not benefit from this frontline therapy. Sensing a market opportunity, Medco Research obtained the intellectual property rights to BiDil, demonstrated its bioequivalence to the H-1 formulation and approached the US Food and Drug Administration(FDA) in 1996 for approval to market this ‘new’ drug. The FDA refused, arguing that clinical trials showing the utility of H-1 for heart failure did not meet the stiff criteria for such approval.

There was a suspicion that the nitric oxide response, and heart failure, was somehow different in blacks than in whites. So Jay Cohn, a respected cardiologist and owner of the original BiDil patent, reanalyzed the original clinical trial data to demonstrate that H-1 did work better in blacks than whites, a contention described and contested in the book. This finding not only led to a new patent but prompted its new owner, NitroMed, to conduct a fresh clinical trial in 2001, involving only African-American patients with heart failure, to demonstrate BiDils utility in this group. None of these facts are in doubt. What is doubted, however, is the implicit assumption that BiDil is not useful for white patients, the chronology of key events and the motivations of various actors in medicine, industry and government—factors that morphed an otherwise convenient drug formulation into a race-specific drug. Kahn makes the charge that “BiDil was not about personalizing medicine; it was about exploiting race to obtain cheaper, quicker FDA approval for a drug.”…

…Genetic analysis strongly suggests that early humans first arose in Africa and emerged out of Africa only ~100,000 years ago, a fairly recent development, evolutionarily speaking, which explains why we are all closely related. Any classification of biological races within our species is arbitrary because there are no major discontinuities in our diversity across the globe. Importantly, genetic data show that currently populous groups are not necessarily reflected by their past abundance, and human history is one of repeated admixture, not maintenance of purity. It is this genetic admixture that has left an imprint on every human disease with a genetic component, including common chronic ones. Thus, it is quite unlikely that the genetic variations underlying our diseases, which represent only a small fraction of our genetic diversity, will vary markedly across humanity…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Mulatto in the United States. by Edward Byron Reuter [Review by: Kelly Miller]

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 25, Number 2, September 1919
pages 218-224

Kelly Miller (1863-1939), Professor of Mathematics and Sociology
Howard University

The Mulatto in the United States. By Edward Byron Reuter. Boston: Badger, 1918. Pp. 417.

The case of the everlasting negro again intrudes itself on public attention in the form of a scientific treatise upon the mulatto in the United States. The author has brought together much interesting and valuable material bearing upon mixed-blood races in all parts of the world.

At the outset the author informs us that his treatise deals “with the sociological consequences of race intermixture, not with the biological problem of the intermixture itself.” The mulatto in the United States has no sociological status; the Eurasian, the half-caste product between the European and the Hindu, constitutes a tertium quid, an outcast by both parent types. But the mulatto in the United States is socially stratified with the mother-race. His case constitutes one of ethnological interest rather than of sociological significance. The three most conspicuous Englishmen produced by the world-war are Lord Kitchener, an Irishman, General Haig, a Scotchman, and Lloyd George, a Welshman. No comparable names have arisen of purely English blood, but the basal English idea predominates, and the racial identity of these illustrious names has not the slightest sociological importance. Moses, the renowned leader of the Israelites, might have been Egyptian, but it was his mighty works rather than incident of blood that counts through all the years. In the United States all negroid elements of whatever blood composition are forced into one social class by outside compulsion. The quantum of different bloods coursing through the veins of distinguished individuals in this class is, practically speaking, a sociological negligibility. The author is, therefore, discussing a theory which he eagerly advocates rather than a condition that actually exists.

The scientific pretension of this treatise is vitiated by the vagueness of fundamental definition. The word mulatto is used as “a general term to include all negroes of mixed ancestry regardless of the degree of intermixture.” This definition is not only unscientific but practically meaningless. A careful observation of negro schools, churches, and miscellaneous gatherings in all parts of the country convinces the reviewer that three-fourths of the negro race have some traceable measure of white blood in their veins. It is, therefore, not the least surprising that practically all eminent negroes in the different walks of life are classified as mulattoes. One is reminded of a famous historian who proved conclusively that the Caucasian race alone had made valuable contributions to civilization by claiming that all people who had made such contributions were Caucasians. At the expense of great labor and pains, the author has analyzed numerous lists of eminent negroes and by some unexplained process has separated the mulattoes from the blacks. Frederick Douglas tells us that genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves. It is indeed a wise negro who knows his own ancestry. Any negro can claim some degree of mixed blood without successful refutation. There is no scientific test of blood composition. The utter worthlessness of his classification is disclosed by a casual selection of four consecutive names arranged in alphabetical order on page 206. Monroe N. Work, R. R. Wright, Sr., R. R. Wright, Jr., and Charles Young are classified as mulattoes. Both in color and negroid characteristics these names would rank below the average of the entire negro race. To rank Nannie Burroughs and Mrs. C. J. Walker as mulattoes certainly evokes a smile. When William Pickens and Colonel Charles Young are so described, the smile breaks into uncontrollable laughter.

…The hundred thousand quadroons and the sixty-nine thousand octoroons together with numerous thousands of the nine hundred thousand mulattoes returned by the census of 1890 are crossing and are still likely to cross the great social divide and incorporate into the white race, in order to escape the lowest status of the despised fraction of their blood.

In some states a person with only one-eighth negro blood is given the legal status of white. The transition of the quadroon, octoroon, and lighter mulattoes will widen the physical margin between the two races. The male more easily crosses the social dead-line than the female. This gives a darker male a wider area for his well-known propensity to mate with a lighter female and will thus facilitate the rapid diffusion of white blood throughout the race…

…The author really proposes a triracial rather than a biracial division. The utter impracticability of this scheme would be found in the impossibility of identifying the so-called mulatto class. The mixed race always represents physical instability. I have known twin brothers who were so diverse in racial characteristics that the one easily crossed the color line and withheld all recognition from his brown brother who could not follow whither he went.

The dual caste system is undemocratic and un-Christian enough; to add a third would be inexcusable compounding of iniquity.

The first fruit of contact of two races of ethnic or cultural diversity is a composite progeny. There exists no biological dead line. Social custom and priestly sanction have never been able to control the cosmic urge to multiply and replenish the earth. The sons of God in their supercilious security never fail to look lustfully upon the daughters of men, while shielding their own females from the embrassure of the lower order of males. The composite progeny is generally the offspring of the male of the stronger race and the female of the weaker race. There is no discovered race repugnance or antipathy when it comes to the fundamental principles of reproduction. Political pronouncements, religious inhibition, social proscription, operate only upon the controlled sex. The first laws regulating slave relations were made to prevent intermarriages of negro males and white females. In the long run it makes no difference whether the races are mixed through the relation of the higher male and the lower female or by the reverse process. The social stigma against the bastard progeny dies out with the third and fourth generation. Intermingling of Norman and Saxon took place largely through bastardization, which has not the slightest influence or effect upon the pride of the Anglo-Saxon today…

Read the entire review here.

The Flesh of Amalgamation: Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 437-446
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0021

Tryon P. Woods, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime & Justice Studies
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory.
By Tavia Nyong’o. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 230 pages.

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracilism.
By Jared Sexton. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 345 pages.

The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. . . . And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it’s not told—literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning.

—NourbeSe Philip

In the postscript to her indomitable poetic treatise on black life and death in the making of the modern world, M. NourbeSe Philip writes of the ongoing mutilation of black humanity through the language of the legal text. She finds, for example, no word for recovering the millions of Africans buried in the “liquid grave” of the Middle Passage: “I find words like resurrect and subaquatic but not ‘exaqua.’ Does this mean that unlike being interred, once you’re underwater there is no retrieval—that you can never be ‘exhumed’ from water?” In the face of this historical cataclysm, Philip uses her poetry to foment a disorder of her own, in search of yet another site of maroonage from what Saidiya Hartman terms slavery’s afterlife. To “release the story that cannot be told,” Philip mutilates the text herself, seeking to “literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning verbs.”

I find it compelling to consider how Philip’s meditations might extend to the contemporary study of race. Is there an imposition of meaning perpetuating a similar kind of violence on the black subject of critical race studies? Within the American studies community, for instance, there seem to be parallel discussions on race. The primary distinction between these two tracks hinges on what to make of racial blackness, a splitting reminiscent of “the presence of excised Africans” explored by Philip (199). Is blackness but one among a diversity of subjectivities and, historical particulars notwithstanding, essentially no different from these other positions, identities, and experiences in terms of authorizing analyses of suffering and struggle? Or is the rupture that blackness represents so essential to the formation of the social itself that any analysis of violence or injustice that is not centered in, derived from, or accountable to the suffering of African-descended peoples risks missing the crux (as opposed to the totality) of the social formation?

Tavia Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz and Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes offer answers to these questions that might discomfit many American studies scholars. Indeed, perhaps their interventions into the matter of racial blackness and its place within the various analytic frameworks of American studies scholars has something to do with their heretofore quiet reception. While both books have been duly reviewed in a handful of journals, thus far they have enjoyed only scant critical engagement from American studies scholars. American studies has become a scholarly community that takes pride in its activist bona fides, that foregrounds its commitment to progressive politics, and that positions social justice as central to its avowed raison d’être. With this in mind, I am wondering if this reluctance to engage indexes Philip’s description of “slavery—the story that simultaneously cannot be told, must be told, and will never be told” (206).

In the June 2012 issue of American Quarterly, this two-track discourse on race was on full display. Dylan Rodríguez wrote a gentle indictment of the response to the public spectacle of state violence on November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, when campus police pepper sprayed students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as part of the Occupy movement. Rodríguez rightfully contrasts the outrage and moral indignation from left-liberal quarters, which was both national and international because of the viral spread of video footage from the incident across social media, against the UC Davis police with what he calls “a broader, commonsense conspiracy of silence” about the larger logic of racist state violence, for which policing is the most visible and fundamental expression. Rodríguez is careful to include brown with black in the category…

The Law Could Make You Rich

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Extra Issue: Volume 13, Number 3.5 (June 2013)

Jared Hardesty
Department of History
Boston College

Jared Hardesty is a PhD candidate in history at Boston College and is currently writing a dissertation on slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in eighteenth-century Boston

Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2011. 432 pp.

Governor Riggins, a leader of Boston’s nineteenth-century black community, once publicly admonished a fellow person of color, William Patterson, and took the opportunity to offer a lesson to the community at large. Patterson had purchased unlicensed liquor for some fellow African Americans, and the authorities in Boston caught him red-handed. In the midst of dressing Patterson down, Riggins expressed the hope that the “law will make you smart.” His proclamation to his fellow Afro-Bostonians—the law could be a source of empowerment for African Americans—may have been lost on Patterson, but it was a message that blacks across the United States heard loud and clear. Half a continent away in St. Louis, Missouri, the mixed-race grandsons of Jacques Clamorgan geared up to file suit and lay claim to their grandfather’s extensive lands. For them, Riggins’s message carried special resonance and an additional caveat. For the Clamorgan men, the law not only made them smart, but could also make them rich…

Read the entire review here.

Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles ed. by Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway (review)

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 36, Number 4, Summer 2013
pages 565-566
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2013.0038

Sarah Rodriguez

In their edited book, Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles, Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway explore the ways in which individuals navigate across their multiple identities and achieve personal integration in the context of our increasingly complex, globalized world. Josselson, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Fielding Graduate University, along with her co-editor Michele Harway, Faculty Research Specialist in the School of Psychology at Fielding Graduate University, bring to the table extensive experience in examining human development in the areas of research and practice, particularly regarding issues of gender development and the intersection of multiple identities.

The book is intended to examine how individuals balance changes in their personal and social location, while integrating and balancing various aspects of their personal and social selves. Approaching their topic from a psychological standpoint, the authors are particularly interested in the personal psychological processes in which individuals engage in order to shift from or transition between multiple identity intersections. Although Josselson and Harway’s explicit interest is in the personal processes of identity navigation, the various authors recognize the significant impact of the social world on internal dialogues and subsequent development across multiple identities. The authors are transparent regarding their positionality on identity as a fluid, socially constructed idea that reflects the social and historical context of our world. These constructs, which were salient across all chapters of the book, serve as a way to connect the wide spectrum of explorations of development that unfold within this text.

To explore the navigation of multiple identities, this book centers on individuals who are navigating across five identity structures: (a) racial minority status and majority status, particularly as it relates to life in the United States; (b) cultures with different values of collectivism versus individualism (or other culturally related values), with examinations of both internal and external conflict; (c) gender identities, including the masculine, feminine, and transgender experiences; (d) roles, particularly as they are related to socially constructed ideas of gender; and (e) cultural expectations versus individual definitions and how those two are often pitted against each other throughout one’s identity development.

The 13 chapters of the book are organized into three loose thematic sections. The first section, consisting of Chapters 2 and 3, considers development both theoretically and phenomenologically in order to address the ways in which current theory can be utilized to understand the navigation of multiple identities. The second section of the book, Chapters 4-8, illuminates the identity navigation process through examples of several groups within the United States, particularly focusing on issues related to masculine and feminine experiences and the multiple identities of women and transgender individuals as well as the duality experienced in Japanese American identity development. Given the background of the authors in issues of gender development, I was not surprised by the heavy influence of gender that can be seen in these chapters and elsewhere within the book.

Chapters 4 and 7, particularly, are important given the growing interest in examining the intersectional nature of masculine and transgender experiences. Section 3, Chapters 9-13, considers a series of cross-cultural populations, including areas relating to Black identity, mixed identity in the context of long-term committed relationships, intersectionality of immigrant males, discourse analysis of multiple identities, and transnational development.

Overall, the text is written from a predominantly psychological approach and is intended as an introduction to multiple identities—€”perfect for graduate students studying identity development in a variety of fields. It has the potential to be used in such fields as psychology, social work, gender studies, and higher education. The authors write in an inviting, easily accessible style, and the editors have organized the material lucidly. Although it is an edited book, it remains true to the theme throughout, even though the theme of navigating multiple identities is very loose and often lends itself to diffused exploration. I appreciated the diverse nature of identities presented in this book, which included race, gender, culture, nationality, and roles. This text provided…

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. By Kathryn Talalay. Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509608-8.

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

Read the entire review here.

Marriage, Melanin, and American Racialism

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 2, June 2013
pages 282-291
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0048

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri

Adele Logan Alexander, Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 375 pages. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index.

Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 288 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, and index.

The development of the multidisciplinary field of Mixed Race Studies over the last few decades has focused new attention on patterns of cross-racial unions and the experiences of people of mixed ancestry in the U.S. and elsewhere. Historians bring to this endeavor a rich understanding of the long history of racial mixing, documenting the tremendous variety of contexts for consensual and nonconsensual interracial sex, the diversity of cultural attitudes and policies towards such relationships, and the resulting spectrums of identity and social standing available to the children, families, and communities that resulted from these unions. While pundits and intellectuals debate the significance of the emergence of multiracial families and identities in the U.S., historians can attest that there is little new here. As George Sánchez has put it from the vantage point of Latino and Latin American history, “Welcome to the Americas!”€  The American past is full of examples of cross-cultural unions, people and communities of mixed ancestry, and marked shifts in racial and ethnic categories in response to demographic, economic, and political changes. So, too, new U.S. scholarship is providing rich contributions to ongoing debates of the meaning of race, racial identity, and racial mixing in the twentieth century and beyond.

The three scholars considered here span this latest surge in U.S. historical studies of racial mixing and mixedness. Adele Logan Alexander is a pioneer in the field. Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In) significance of Melanin joins her previous books in focusing on communities and families of mixed—€”primarily black and white—€”ancestry. In her latest offering, Alexander rescues to historical memory the fascinating political careers of Ida Gibbs (1862-1957) and William Henry Hunt (1863-1951), whose activist and diplomatic work, respectively, brought them into close, if sometimes ambivalent, connection with African American and Pan-African communities in the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Like Alexander’s earlier works, Parallel Worlds spans multiple methodologies, this time offering a rich entre into an international world of shifting racial identities and political loyalties. Faye Botham’s Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law, on the other hand, is her first academic book, reworking a religious studies dissertation. Botham identifies a large and significant gap in historians’€™ collective approach to interracial marriage and its accompanying concerns with racial identity and categorization; social constructions of gender, race, and sexuality; and civil rights. Her work models a new direction of inquiry into the role of religious ideology and influence on what Peggy Pascoe calls miscegenation law, particularly the distinctive Catholic doctrine on marriage as a sacrament. In turn, Pascoe’€™s research for her recent publication spans this new age of historical scholarship. Begun in the early 1990s with a few pieces published as articles, the long-awaited and much celebrated What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a multilayered cultural, social, and legal history of post-Civil War legal prohibitions against interracial marriages and the enduring significance of the laws.

The books by Botham and Pascoe share an interest in legal and cultural sanctions against interracial marriage, but each author comes to the subject from vastly different training and experience. (Pascoe was a member of Botham’s dissertation committee, and that difference in academic maturity is evident in their works as well.) Botham’€™s analysis of the impact of American Catholic and Protestant theology on race and interracial marriage is strongest in her treatment of the Perez v. Lippold case (better known as Perez v. Sharp), which ultimately overturned California’s anti-intermarriage laws. Botham is especially interested in the longer history of Catholic influence on both Perez and the later Loving v. Virginia case, which respectively offer evidence of American Catholics’€™ support for and opposition to interracial marriage. The prominence of Catholics in bringing and opposing these legal challenges to laws against interracial marriage is most central to her analysis. But she returns to a focused treatment of the Perez case several…

Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century by Circe Sturm (review)

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 37, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2013
pages 269-272
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.2013.0006

Miguel A. Maymí

Circe Sturm’s book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century is an insightful view into the motivations of those who began identifying as Cherokee on the US census in recent years. There has been an explosion in the number of Americans now self-identifying as Native American (an increase of 647 percent from 1960 to 2000), an overwhelming majority of whom identify specifically as Cherokee. Circe Sturm, herself a Mississippi Choctaw descendant, set out to discover who these “racial shifters” were and why they had suddenly decided to become Indian. She also set out to discover what the politics and sentiments citizen Cherokees held for those “racial shifters.”

Sturm’s analysis is very ambitious. She sets out to answer a great deal of questions that vary from social, economic, and political implications of racial shifting for both those making the shift and citizen Cherokees, as well as theoretical and analytical practices and understandings in the field sites. However, the overriding question she asks is, Why are so many people shifting from simply claiming family ties to identifying as a more explicitly Native American ethnicity (8)? She strives to uncover the underlying motivations surrounding these decisions and considers whether they are mostly part of an attempt to reap the perceived financial and institutional benefits or whether there is an emotional reason behind the shift.

From the outset of the book, Sturm makes a clear dichotomy, which she puts in constant conversation throughout the work: the essentially “authentic” citizen Cherokee and the racial shifters. Citizen Cherokees are those who have legal, federal recognition as being Cherokee, whereas racial shifters are “individuals who have changed their self-identification on the U.S. census from non-Indian to Indian in recent years” (5). Sturm also delves into the discussion of white privilege as an essential differentiator between race shifters and those who were born Cherokee, the establishment of Cherokee neotribal sects and the perceived threats to the federally recognized tribes they impose, and the greater implications of a country whose citizens are increasingly abandoning their white identity in preference for a less privileged and more discriminated Indian race.

Sturm’s book is derived from primarily three sources. First, she conducted both formal and informal research with the three nationally recognized tribes: the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and United Keetoowah band of Cherokee Indians. Second, Sturm’s data are based on a survey she mailed out to leaders of prominent self-identified and state-recognized Cherokee groups; she received only a limited number in return from primarily retired and older members. Finally, much of Sturm’s information comes from interviews with racial shifters conducted by her research assistant, Jessica Walker Blanchard, who was sent to Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma to conduct interviews with racial shifters. That Dr. Sturm is three times removed (and her reader four times) from the interviews with racial shifters attained by her assistant is inherently fraught and problematic (I will discuss this issue below).

Becoming Indian is divided into two parts, split down Strum’s dichotomous line of the race shifter and the citizen Cherokee. Part 1 is an analysis of the motivations and undercurrents of the migration of racial shifter identity. The first chapter of part 1 (chapter 2) explores the stories that commonly mark the impetus for change for many racial shifters. She states that from the interviews we can see that “race shifting is always a narrative act,” that in the stories racial shifters tell we can see the changing of self. Sturm identifies a common thread in the narratives, that of hiding, passing, and persecution. She ends the chapter by discussing the apparent need for racial essentialism, which plays out in these stories through the trope of Indian blood. Chapter 3 analyzes the inescapable whiteness that is inherent in racial shifters. That white privilege enables them to choose their ethnicity and thus is part of their identity. She nevertheless discusses how many racial shifters consciously attempt to completely…

Prodigy and Prejudice

The New York Times
1995-12-10

Phyllis Rose

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. By Kathryn Talalay. Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Oxford University Press

This enthralling, heartbreaking book restores to attention Philippa Schuyler, child prodigy of the 1930’s, pianist, composer, Harlem’s Mozart, “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” Her father was George Schuyler, a well-known black journalist. Her mother was Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, the white daughter of a Texas rancher. Insisting that her daughter was the normal product of “hybrid vigor” and good nutrition, Jody Schuyler dedicated her to the cause of integration: Philippa’s brilliance would break down racial barriers in America. Instead, as Kathryn Talalay tells this important story, racial barriers and a manipulative, demanding mother broke Philippa.

Based on fascinating family papers in New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler” begins by plunging us into a 1920’s world of race enthusiasm: “Nordics” go to Harlem for the night life and white girls date black men to rattle their families and prove to themselves they have interesting lives. Josephine Cogdell arrived in New York in 1927, wanting to write. She had contributed pieces to The Messenger, a left-wing black publication whose editor was George Schuyler. They met and were immediately attracted to each other.

A fanatic diarist, Jody even described their first kiss, revealing (or boasting) that she found George’s lips “softer and more sensuous than white lips.” Her primitivist ideas — the flip side of racism—glorified everything African and saw salvation in miscegenation. She encouraged herself to marry Schuyler with the thought that “the white race . . . is spiritually depleted and America must mate with the Negro to save herself.”…

…From the age of 8, Philippa concertized constantly, a darling of both the black and the white press, a role model in black communities throughout America. Her visibility was achieved through George’s press connections and Jody’s tireless management. At 15, she soloed with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium before an audience of 12,000, in a program that included one of her own compositions. (A symphony she wrote at 13 was, Virgil Thomson said, as interesting as the symphonies Mozart wrote at that age.)

But some thought her playing had been undermined by her relentless performance schedule, and the older she got the more it seems emotional turmoil prevented her from being a great artist. She made the transition from child prodigy to concert pianist, but by her mid-teens, whether because of her own inadequacies or racial barriers or both, she had gone as far as she would go as a performer in America—she was a success with black audiences, but of limited appeal to whites…

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