Mixed Race Studies

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review)

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 208-210
E-ISSN: 1080-6512; Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0007

Kirin Wachter-Grene
University of Washington, Seattle

Jared Sexton. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Anxieties about American multiracial identity and practices, known in the nineteenth century as “amalgamation” or “miscegenation,” have been percolating in the national imagination for centuries. Since the 1980s, however, this cultural fascination has become explicitly politicized across sundry civic and intellectual landscapes, and since referred to as “multiracialism” or “mestizaje” (“mixture”). Broadly speaking, multiracialism, while re-structuring racial/ethnic classifications, curiously strives to provide freedom from being identified as or self-identifying as explicitly racialized. It is, in essence, a call for a supra-racial, or post-racial society. While the socio-political complications of this proposal have been the subject of recent scholarly work, the sexual politics of the multiracial movement have gone largely critically unexamined.

In his first book, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Jared Sexton argues that multiracial politics, presented as the solution to racial controversy in the post-civil rights United States, actually reifies racial essentialism, evokes and implements antiblack racism, and denounces decades of black theoretical work and organizing traditions in its ultimate attempt to de-legitimize blackness as a viable political, social, and sexual identity. Lewis Gordon, Minkah Makalani, and Rainier Spencer have constructed similar arguments about the supposed inherent antiblack racism prevalent in multiracial politics, but Sexton, while acknowledging and extending their insights, integrates a strong argument about sexual politics into the prevailing discourse. He argues that multiracialism is not, as it claims, a political antithesis to white supremacy or sexual racism. Rather, multiracialism codifies normative sexuality within and across the color line with disastrous effects, producing a desexualization of race, and a deracialization of sex that reinforces racist sexual pathologies. Exposing the inextricable relation between sexuality and racism, specifically in regards to multiracialism’s articulations of interracial sex (defined by Sexton as a relationship in which one of the partners is black), comprises the bulk of this work. Throughout the book the terms “multiracialism” and “interracialism” are primarily used by Sexton to examine relations between blacks and whites or blacks and non-white, non-black people. Rarely does he apply the terms to analyze relations between other racial groups, a theoretical move that at times is awkwardly articulated and exclusionary, but integral to Sexton’s thesis that blackness is the matrix through which racialization is constructed, and that multiracialism engenders a denial of specifically black legitimacy.

Multiracialism strives to disarticulate mixed race individuals from the one-drop rule of hypodescent—the rule that was wielded in nineteenth-century America to render all mixed race individuals black by law. Multiracialism, Sexton argues, is an epistemological denouncement of systems of racial classification, not of racism itself. It is the goal of contemporary multiracialism to allow for mixed race individuals to self-identify as “mixed” (i.e., Sexton argues, not black). Claiming to be “mixed” and more broadly, claiming a “mestizo” (4) American nationalism is erroneous, in that it disregards the de facto Atlantic hybridity of all black subjects, and propagates a neoliberal “color blind” ideology that is really an amalgamation of whiteness actively striving to eradicate blackness from the cultural ethnic makeup. “Because the disassociation of multiracial people from racial whiteness is historically intractable,” Sexton writes, “the description of ‘the offspring of these unions’ as ‘neither one race or another’ is an artifice, a means of more subtly declaring that ‘mixed race’ should never have been viewed merely as a ‘subset’ of ‘blackness'” (74). In other words, though the multiracial movement strives to eradicate white supremacist tendencies by disarticulating notions of racial essentialism, it succeeds only in reifying those same racialized categories. If one is mixed and, in essence, claiming neither race, one is suggesting that there are pure races with which to disidentify, particularly the race of “pure” blackness because whiteness is normative and historically obstinate. Ultimately, it is this amalgamated form of “whiteness” that Sexton posits as the ideological goal of multiracial advocates…

Read the entire review here.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan

Social Science Japan Journal
Published Online: 2012-01-19
DOI: 10.1093/ssjj/jyr053

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan, by Laurel D. Kamada. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2009, 272 pp., (hardcover ISBN 978-1-84769-233-7), (paperback ISBN 978-1-84769-232-0)

I hated it when I was little … the school trip photo … only MY face was somehow different, so I hated that, and now … it’s like it’s good, I guess.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls captures the raw voices of teenage girls, revealing their intimate feelings about being ‘half ’ in Japan. Laurel Kamada gives us a rich account of adolescent development and identity construction, based on group interviews with six girls of mixed ancestry, presenting their actual voices in conversations with her and each other. Kamada takes up three central questions: (a) tensions and dilemmas of hybridity, (b) celebration of hybridity, and (c) the intersection of hybridity and gender. Her study is informed and inspired by her insider knowledge of the data collection site of Western Japan, and her long residences living, working, and raising her own mixed-ancestry child there. She is careful to position herself as a white, Western woman and acknowledges how she influences the research through reflexive commentary.

The girls are a population rarely heard from—public school students from intact families, with one Japanese parent and one non-Japanese (white-foreign) parent. They are from families who made a conscious decision to raise them by integrating them into Japanese society through education at regular local Japanese schools, rather than sending them to private international schools. Historically, this is a major dilemma for mixed-ancestry children, going back to Miki Sawada’s famous Saunders Home, where she raised and educated children after World War II, and continuing up to the recent Amerasian School in Okinawa. The controversy of whether mixed-ancestry children should be educated in public schools or in special schools has been not only an issue of race but also of class, with those whose families could afford it opting for the friendlier, more comfortable environment of international schools,…

Read or purchase the review here.

Book Review: Go White, Young Man

Vanderbilt Law Review
Volume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30)
10 pages

Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law
University of North Carolina School of Law

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Sharfstein’s book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the color line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. These case studies tell us what it is to be American—how race is central to our identity, how we use race to take down opponents or to exclude—and how the line separating black and white is sometimes porous. However, is not the story of race and American legal history about the ways that race is defined by law and by norms? Race mattered because people policed the line separating blacks and whites. That many states classified people with a small percentage of African ancestry as white suggests that it was possible to move across the color line. Still, the cases where the color line was policed, rather than crossed, are significant.

Our nation’s struggle with race is now about one-third of a millennium long. So there is a lot for Daniel Sharfstein’s epic work of American history, The Invisible Line, to engage as it sweeps across centuries—from Virginia in the 1600s to Washington, DC, in the 1950s—and as it details generations of lives, from humble farmers in Appalachia to heirs of Gilded Age merchants. Where most other people who have looked at such issues focus on the chasm between white and black, Sharfstein looks at people on the line separating black and white. He is able in this way to get at key—and often overlooked—issues, such as how people have crossed the color line in America and what efforts to cross and police it tell us about our national struggle with race and with equality.

To detail the sine curve of attitudes towards race, Sharfstein offers three case studies of how racial categorization has functioned and how it kept (or attempted to keep) African-Americans in their place. The book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. Sharfstein’s elegant prose illuminates how the color line functioned for people on both sides of it. For those who could do so, there were great incentives to claim to be white rather than black. In one era, race could define who might be a slave; in later eras, it was central to who could live in desirable locations, who could go to the most desirable schools, who could have access to the best government jobs. From statutes to social norms, African-Americans were told that they were inferior and had to maintain their place. Thus, those who might pass for white—those who had light enough skin color and perhaps the geographic mobility to mask their family history—often did so.

Some of the story of passing is well known. President Warren G. Harding is said to have remarked in response to an allegation that he had African ancestry, “How do I know? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” Some of the best-known literature of the Jim Crow era was about crossing the color line, like Nella Larson’s Passing. And even antebellum literature often addressed the crossing of the line from black to white. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, has a vignette about a light-skinned former slave who passed for white. Yet, even though we know that families crossed the color line (or attempted to), one wonders if the most important lessons from Sharfstein’s book are the ways the line was successfully policed rather than the ways it was crossed…

…We learn a great deal about the policing of the color line in Sharfstein’s book. Attempts to prevent passing sometimes failed, as in the Regulator Movement and in the Spencers’ Appalachia. In both of those cases, opponents of families who had once been identified as African-American unsuccessfully claimed that they were still African-American. But Sharfstein illustrates numerous occasions when the line was successfully policed: in Washington, DC, after Reconstruction, when O.S.B. Wall helped lead a western exodus movement; in the early twentieth century, when disfranchisement of blacks led to loss of representation in Congress and loss of civil service jobs, such as Stephen Wall’s at the Government Printing Office; and when an heir to the Field fortune—who, as a member of the Gibson family, had some African ancestry—put on a display at the Field Museum about the races of mankind.

We learn that statutes helped police the color line. For instance, statutes defined the blood quantum that permitted one to be considered white. Yet even when statutes defined one as black, social norms often classified a person as white. Sharfstein makes a bold statement about the porous nature of the color line in regard to slavery: “The difference between black and white was less about ‘blood’ or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white.” This argument shifts the basis for being considered black from blood quantum to status—though the two were often highly correlated…

Read the entire review here.

Passing Fancies: Color, much more than race, dominated the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance

The Wall Street Journal
2011-09-03

James Campbell

Harlem Renaissance Novels, Edited by Rafia Zafar, Library of America, 1,715 pages

Harlem in the autumn of 1924 offered a “foretaste of paradise,” according to the novelist Arna Bontemps. He was recalling the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance and was perhaps a little dazzled in retrospect—Bontemps was writing in 1965—by his memories of “strings of fairy lights” illuminating the uptown “broad avenues” at dusk.

A gloomier perspective is found in the writings of James Baldwin, born in Harlem Hospital in August 1924. His novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) and his memoir, “The Fire Next Time” (1963), both evoke a Harlem childhood dominated by poverty, fear, brutality, with the dim torch of salvation locked in a storefront church. Baldwin scarcely mentions the renaissance or its principals in all his writings—despite the remarkable coincidence of his having attended schools where two mainstays of any account of the Harlem Renaissance were teachers: the poet Countee Cullen and the novelist Jessie Redmon…

…Any rebirth is bound to be bloody, and perhaps the better for it. Grudge, guilt and prejudice notwithstanding, the Harlem Renaissance produced a lot of good writing, some of it worth reading eight decades later. Almost all the novels chosen by Rafia Zafar for the Library of America’s two-volume collection contain scenes of interest, even when the interest is mainly sociological. (The exception is George Schuyler’s 1931 “Black No More,” a far-fetched, burlesque yarn about passing for white that might have been omitted in favor of Van Vechten’s “Nigger Heaven.”) The predominant theme of the majority of novels here—to the point of obsession—is not so much prejudice as plain color. Bigoted white voices are heard, but light-skinned blacks expressing distaste for their darker neighbors speak louder. As the heroine of Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” (1928) observes: “Negro society . . . was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society.”

The most arresting tale, in this respect, is “The Blacker the Berry” (1929) by Wallace Thurman, in which poor Emma Lou Morgan, daughter of a “quite fair” mother, realizes that her “luscious black complexion” is despised by those around her, many of whom can pass for white. Emma Lou’s “unwelcome black mask” has been inherited from her “no good” father, who had “never been in evidence.” Ill-treatment from white students and teachers at school is bad enough; but when Emma Lou gets to Harlem, the humiliation turns to cruelty. She tries to rent a room from a West Indian woman. “A little girl had come to the door, and, in answer to a voice in the back asking, ‘Who is it, Cora?’ had replied, ‘monkey chaser wants to see the room you got to rent.’ ” Emma Lou remains, for the time being, homeless. When she shows her admiration “boldly” for an “intelligent-looking, slender, light-brown-skinned” man on Seventh Avenue, he “looked at her, then over her, and passed on.” Far worse are a group of Harlem youths who notice Emma Lou powdering her nose near the same spot…

…It was the same sigh, rather than crude shame, that led Jean Toomer to describe himself on his marriage certificate of 1931 as “white.” His exquisite sequence of prose episodes and poems, “Cane” (1923), is the earliest of the books gathered here. It requires but a sampling of Toomer’s humid Georgia prose to induce in the reader a different quality of intoxication from that brought about by the rough beverages of McKay, Hughes and Schuyler: “Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir.”…

Read the entire review here.

The Souls of Mixed Folk [Review: Samatar]

Sofia Samatar
2012-02-05

Sofia Samatar

This book, by Stanford professor Michele Elam, comes at you with a provocative title and a provocative cover.

The title, a reference to the brilliant and still relevant 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is provocative because it could be read as trivializing a classic of African-American literature and cultural theory. The cover, which shows an image of “Baby Halfie Brown Head” by artist Lezley Saar, is provocative because of the way it presents a mixed-race body as a creepy, freakish-looking doll.

If you are bothered by these things, you should keep reading Elam’s book. She explains very quickly that she doesn’t mean to trivialize Du Bois: her title comes from a frame in Nate Creekmore’s comic strip, Maintaining, and she chose it for a number of good reasons, among them a wish “to both evoke and unsettle expectations, to prepare the reader for examples of art, literature, comics, and drama that collectively reframe…conversations about the ‘spiritual strivings’ of mixed race people.” The disturbing doll on the cover is meant to play a similar role. Elam writes: “Politically incorrect in an age seeking to answer ever more earnestly the philosophical and democratic problem of ‘the one and the many,’ its body will not deliver the desired whole.”…

Read the entire review here.

Race, Forgetting, and the Law

The Atlantic
2010-07-30

Sara Mayeux

Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a tour-de-force of archival research, bringing to light countless criminal prosecutions, civil cases, and bureaucratic decisions through which miscegenation laws were enforced not just in the South but throughout the nation; and not just in the deep past, but well into my parents’ lifetimes; and not just between blacks and whites but between blacks and whites and Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans….. the list could go on. The book spans the 1860s through the 1960s, with a focus on the less-well-known story of race-based marriage laws in the Western states, including California.

Throughout, Pascoe is attentive not just to ideologies of race but also to ideologies of gender, and the complex interactions between them. This history is not, she insists, simple, and “interracial couples should be relieved of the burden of having to stand as one-dimensional heroes and heroines.” Many, like the now-famous Lovings, wanted mostly to be left alone. “Mr. Cohen,” Richard Loving told his Supreme Court advocate, “tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

One of Pascoe’s themes is the role that forgetting plays in the law. In the years immediately following the Civil War, some state courts had upheld interracial marriages (typically in cases involving a white husband whose privileges and property rights the courts wanted to protect), and some states had repealed their antebellum anti-miscegenation laws. But this was all quickly forgotten. After legislators had reinstated the laws and judges had overturned or simply abandoned the earlier rulings, bans on interracial marriage came to seem, to almost everyone, “natural” and “traditional,” the way it had always been…

Read the entire review here.

Books: Black and white thinking

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Edward P. Antonio, Associate Professor of Theology and Social Theory
Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado

Brian Bantum. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 260 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781602582934.

Redeeming Mulatto presents a complex argument about theology and race. It is impossible to do it justice in a short review. Brian Bantum persuasively challenges traditional ways of thinking about race in the United States by theologically retrieving interracial identity as an important category that has been unduly neglected. In this way he addresses the American tendency to understand race relations in terms of the binary opposition between black and white.

Bantum describes the historical experience of being mulatto/a by suggesting that race in the U.S. functions like religion or as a form of discipleship into which we are all recruited…

Read or purchase the article here.

The new black theology: Retrieving ancient sources to challenge racism

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Jonathan Tran, Assistant Professor of Religion
Baylor University, Waco, Texas

Read Edward Antonio’s review of Brian Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto (subscription required)

A couple years ago, when the Century asked some leading theologians to name five “essential theology books of the past 25 years,” J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) was one of the few books mentioned more than once and the only one that was published in the past five years. Last year, the Ameri­can Academy of Religion gave its Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion to Willie J. Jennings’s The Christian Imagi­nation: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). These two influential works, together with Re­deeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor University Press, 2010), by Brian Bantum (who studied at Duke with both Carter and Jennings), represent a major theological shift that will—if  taken as seriously as it deserves—change the face not only of black theology but theology as a whole….

…In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum makes his own use of patristic formulations about Christ in order to address the promises and challenges of interracial existence. He views mixed-race persons through the lens of “the hypostatic union,” the early church’s term for the union of divine and human in Christ. Amid the pains and confusions of what was once branded “mongrelization” stands the fullness of Christ’s joining of humanity and divinity. For Bantum, the mulatto “participates in” Christ’s fullness; biracial individuals “perform” the drama of redemption as scripted in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In Christ’s person, one confronts not only the mystery of divinity but the “impossible possibility” of humanity joined to divinity. Jesus “was mulatto not solely because he was a ‘mixture,’ but because his very body confounds the boundaries of purity/impurity and humanity/divinity that seemed necessary for us to imagine who we thought we should be.”

Baptized into this body, the church in all of its differences offers the world a genuinely reconciled body of diverse persons, in contrast to political orders that exclude (the opposite of baptism) in the name of race, gender, nation, class, ethnicity and so on. According to Bantum, the church speaks the language attuned to this politics of difference: prayer. This is good news for each one of us who is “passing” through America’s complex racial heritage, and it is an indictment of those seeking racial purity and the banishment of racial difference.

When Bantum uses creedal affirmations of Christ’s humanity and divinity to uplift historically shamed biracial persons, he, like Carter and Jennings, speaks in terms that cannot be easily dismissed by white theologians. If Bantum is right about Christology, any Christian (white or otherwise) who affirms the Chalcedonian formula about Christ’s two natures must rethink mulatto life. And if he refuses such rethinking, he cannot blame Bantum’s alleged lack of orthodoxy…

Read the entire article here.

Born Along the Racial Fault Line

The New York Times
2011-11-06

Janet Maslin

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir By Mark Whitaker. Illustrated. 357 pages. Simon & Schuster.

As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.

“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”

Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told…

Read the entire review here.

Negro Genius—Reviewed work(s):

The Journal of American Folklore
Volume 18, Number 71 (October-December, 1905)
pages 319-322

NEGRO GENIUS. As a dispatch from Washington, D. C., the “Evening Transcript” (Boston, Mass.) of February 18, 1905, published the following concerning the investigations of Mr. Daniel Murray: –

“Daniel Murray, for many years an assistant in the Library of Congress, is preparing a historical review of the contributions of the colored race to the literature of the world, with a complete bibliography relating to that subject. Public attention was sharply called to this question of the intellectual capacity of the Negro six years ago by Booker T. Washington and other colored men of prominence, when the United States government was preparing an exhibit for the Exposition at Paris, 1900. Mr. Washington urged that advantage be taken of the opportunity to show what the colored race had contributed to the world’s literature. The authorities consenting, Mr. Putnam, librarian of Congress, detailed Mr. Murray to make a list of all books and pamphlets written and published by authors identified with the colored race. As only four months intervened from the detail to the opening, the list was far from complete and very deficient in full historical information which has now been supplied.

“Mr. Murray’s work was practically begun about twenty-five years ago, when he commenced to gather material for such a work after reading Grégoire’s ‘Inquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes and Mulattoes, Quadroons, etc.,’ 1810. Grégoire formed in 1790, in Paris, a society called ‘Friends of the Blacks,’ designed to secure their emancipation in the French colonies. Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were members. ‘One of the aims of this society,’ said Mr. Murray, ‘was to gather evidence of capacity on the part of Negroes and mulattoes, the same being designed to reinforce the argument the society intended to present to the French convention, to induce it to grant full equality to the mulattoes, etc., in the colonies. Benjamin Banneker, a mulatto, born in Maryland, to whom credit is due for saving to the American people L’Enfant’s original plan of the city of Washington when L’Enfant broke with the commissioners and took away his plans, which he later sold to Governor Woodward for laying out the city of Detroit, was an intimate friend of Jefferson’s and was often held up as evidence that no mulatto should be a slave. Banneker exhibited mathematical knowledge, and compiled in 1792 an almanac which Jefferson sent to the Anti-Slavery Society in Paris to support his view that the mulatto was the equal of the white man. Jefferson had high regard for Banneker and formally invited him to be his guest at Monticello, and in other ways treated him as an equal.

“‘In the same spirit animating Grégoire, and for the same purpose, to show to the world that the colored race, under which head I include all not white or who have a strain of African blood, is entitled to greater credit than is now accorded it by the American people, I have prosecuted my researches. I claim for the colored race whatever credit of an intellectual character a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon has won in the world of letters, and believe a fair examination of the evidence will remove no little prejudice against African blood. It has generally been accepted by scholars that ” Phillis Wheatley’s Poems,” 1773, was the first book by a Negro to display unusual intelligence and win recognition from the Caucasian. But this is not so. Beginning with Alexander the Great and his black general, Clitus, I have patiently gathered the facts from authentic sources of every highly creditable act by a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon in the forum of letters or the polite arts…

Read the entire article here.