Mixed Race Studies

“My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir,” by Mark Whitaker

The Washington Post
2011-10-14

Jonathan Yardley, Critic

Now in his mid-50s, Mark Whitaker has had an impressive journalistic career. Fresh out of Harvard in the late 1970s, he went to work at Newsweek and rose steadily through various assignments, eventually becoming its editor. In 2006 he moved to NBC, at first as “the number two executive in the news division,” then as chief of its Washington bureau. Now he is executive vice president and managing editor of CNN Worldwide, an immensely influential position given that CNN reaches into almost every nook and cranny of the world.

All of which makes for quite a resume, but it also makes for the least interesting part of “My Long Trip Home,” Whitaker’s memoir. It’s worth reading because it’s a thoughtful account of growing up bi-racial at a point in this country’s history when racial identities are in flux and when people of mixed race are ever more common…

…“My Long Trip Home” is not a confessional memoir of the sort so popular these days, especially among younger memoirists who have nothing to confess except the cruelties allegedly inflicted upon them by others or simply by life itself. For the most part Whitaker’s tone is objective, almost reportorial, which permits the reader to see his story clearly rather than through the mists of hyperventilated emotion. It’s a good book.

Read the entire review here.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico (review)

Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Volume 115, Number 2, October 2011
E-ISSN: 1558-9560 Print ISSN: 0038-478X
pages 214-215

William M. Clements, Professor of English
Arkansas State University

Shirley Boteler Mock, Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico, Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2010, 400 pp.

In the early 1700s, Spanish and Native communities in Florida were offering refuge for runaway slaves from the British colonies. Meanwhile, dissidents from the Creek Nation were forming an independent confederation using the name “Seminole.” Persons of African descent found the Seminole communities particularly welcoming, and many developed relationships of servitude with the Indians. Although sometimes considered to be “slaves,” these blacks, in fact, enjoyed much more independence than their counterparts in the colonies that became the states of the Old South, particularly in their ability to maintain African-derived cultural forms while integrating with the Seminoles, often through marriage. Nevertheless, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, these blacks were considered property and, despite the armed resistance known as the Second Seminole War, accompanied the Seminoles who were transported to Indian Territory in 1838. There they became subject to stricter slave codes. Finding these…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory [Review: Zack]

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 2 (2010)
pages 269-270
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2010.481885

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Tavia Nyong’o
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Pp. 230. ISBNs 978 0 8166 5612 7 and 978 0 8166 5613 4

If The Amalgamation Waltz were not a 230-page book, published by a university press, complete with scholarly apparatus, readers might think that Alan Sokal was at it again, this time with the bad taste to caricature postmodern treatments of mixed race—as though mixed race did not already have a history of tragedy in fiction and biography. But alas, Tavia Nyong’o’s jargon-ridden exercise in “mixed-race theory” probably is the sincere but feverish reworking of a doctoral dissertation written under great stress, which it purports to be. Most readers, after reviving from the stupor induced by grappling with the first half of the introduction, would probably simply recycle the book unread and have done with it. But, I am heartened by the fact that mixed race has become a sufficiently respectable intellectual topic to support publication of even such a failed effort.

Nyong’o’s major theme appears to be that the idea of racial miscegenation enables certain errors in the mass political memory (which is something like a Jungian collective unconscious, only structured by anxiety). The idea of racial miscegenation leads to a “miscegenation of time.” When time is miscegenated, temporal order gets disorganized, so that what people imagine as A preceding B is in reality a case of B preceding A. Thus, the idea of mixed race is imagined to come after the idea of pure race. But in reality, the idea of mixed race comes first and the idea of pure race is constructed as a defense against the nightmarish chaos and danger evoked by the idea of mixed race. However, to put it this way might be too literal, because Nyongo writes, “My method employs the archive as a practice of ‘countermemory’ but without the pretense of using it to build a complete or coherent historical narrative” (p. 7). Indeed, such a narrative is not possible insofar as the “spurious issue” of mixed race/hybridity/amalgamation is not a thing but a performance that defers solution of racial problems into some future in which it (m-r/h/a) will transcend race.

Although Nyongo begins The Amalgamation Waltz by castigating Americans for the assumption that that the history of race in the U.S. offers the final meanings of race words, the four chapters of the book are largely restricted to American history. Chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty,” is about representations of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race patriot or insurgent who was killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770. Nyong’o weaves Attucks’s role as a symbol of unresolved racial injustice in colonial times with reflection on a book in the Wellcome Library in London that is falsely described as bound in the “Tanned Skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence.” Nyong’o notes that some books were in fact bound in human skin, a practice called “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (p. 37). Chapter two, “In Night’s Eye,” begins with a nineteenth-century story about a traveler in a coach at night, who informs his companions that the idea of amalgamation is used by anti-abolitionists to frighten and shock abolitionists. This notion of moral panic, based on imagery of sexual disorder, is further developed throughout the chapter, and Nyong’o makes a lucid case that such imagery was used by both sides of the slavery…

Read or purchase the review here.

A Review of “Mixed Race Hollywood”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video
Volume 28, Issue 5 (2011)
pages 428-433
DOI: 10.1080/10509200902820589

Delia Konzett, Associate Professor of English
University of New Hampshire

Mixed Race Hollywood, edited by Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas. New York: New York University Press, 2008

The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. Dubois would famously write in 1903, is that of the color line. Over 100 years later, we can unfortunately still say the problem of the 21st century is the color line, particularly our inability to move beyond entrenched binary conceptions of race (white/black or white/nonwhite) and acknowledge the new multiracial contexts that inform our present global, multicultural, and multimedia era. Mixed Race Hollywood is a timely and extremely valuable collection of essays that explores the various facets of the history of mixed race representation in mainstream American film and media.

Such representation has a long and complex tradition in Hollywood, ranging from the notorious depiction of the treacherous mulatto in Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) and the non-threatening interracial pairing of Shirley Temple and Bojangles Robinson in The Little Colonel (David Butler, 1935) and The Littlest Rebel (David Butler, 1935) to the mixed race love affair in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967) that symbolically announced the arrival proper of civil rights. Since the mid 1990s, as the anthology’s editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas note, there has been a significant cultural shift in mixed race representation as seen in the “veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in…

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The “Common Sense” of Race

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

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

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

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

Read the entire essay here.

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

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

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

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

Read the entire essay here.

Family Histories of ‘Passing’ from Black to White Documented in Book

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-09-06

Katti Gray

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family’s decades-old designation as Coloured, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government’s hierarchy of peoples.
 
Though being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
 
That her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. “I came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,” said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
 
His book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid’s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
 
With this nation’s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness—notwithstanding one’s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair—to live as White…

…Cape Cod, Mass., is where Isabel Wall Whittemore’s forebears ended up.
 
“Until I read [Sharfstein’s] book, I didn’t realize that, in my mom’s day, 1/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,” said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss., with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. “To tell you the truth… I’ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I’d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn’t matter to me either way… Race isn’t important.”
 
Roughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein’s book, a homework assignment for Colby’s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall’s family tree. “I’ve met a lot of cousins who I didn’t know,” Colby said. “I, myself, think this is great … in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.”
 
Not everyone who’s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that “he’d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,” Sharfstein said. “Initially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity—and nothing makes you more ‘White’ than hating Black people. That’s my inference.”…

Read the entire article here.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities [Review: DaCosta]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 40, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 571-572
DOI: 10.1177/0094306111419111i

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities, by Sultana Choudhry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 219 pp. cloth. ISBN: 9780754678601.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities is a study of identity choices among South Asian/white individuals in the United Kingdom. The term “South Asian” refers here to peoples with ancestry from the Indian subcontinent, including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Sultana Choudhry situates her study primarily in the social psychology literature and in the growing body of social science literature on mixed race or, to use the author’s preferred term, “interethnic” people in the Anglophone world. In focusing on South Asian/white interethnics, the author begins to fill a gap in both literatures. She rightly points out that there is a relative dearth of research on South Asian/white interethnics in Britain, despite the fact that they comprise a substantial proportion of interethnics in a society in which interethnic births are on the rise.

This is a multi-method study, incorporating semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, retrospective diary accounts of factors that influenced respondents’ ethnic identity choices and a survey of 87 interethnics of a variety of ethnoracial combinations. While the majority of respondents were interethnic, some phases of the study include monoethnic respondents, including some parents of the interethnic respondents.

While I applaud this use…

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Review: ‘Spit Back a Boy’ by Iain Haley Pollock

BuzzleGoose.com
2011-09-01

Nick Defina

A student of MIT once remarked that attending that particular institution as an undergraduate was much like taking a drink of water from a firehose. The same could be said about reading Iain Haley Pollock’s collection of blistering poems, selected by Elizabeth Alexander as winner of the Cave Caanem Award, and graced with the outlandish title of Spit Back a Boy. Pollock’s main concern with his poems seems to be the sharp, undeniable close-knittedness of family and race, and the demanding, life-long connotations those two ideas carry with them.

…The closing poem (in my opinion one of the strongest in the collection) starts out bitter and distant, yet miraculously Pollock becomes grounded by the very skin he so longed to shed. After growing up in a world of black and white, with Pollock caught in his own private purgatory of mixed-race chaos, he comes to understand that people are not as short-sighted as they used to be. People, in the end, are not as self-absorbed and clueless as they seem…

Read the entire review here.

Are you white enough?

Salon.com
2008-11-10

Laura Miller, Senior Writer

From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary.

Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending on how you interpret his race. Race is such a monumental force in American culture and politics that the idea that it has to be interpreted may strike many people as bizarre. Of course Obama is black, some might argue, judging by his appearance, or by his self-identification as an African-American or even by his marriage and important relationships with other African-Americans. Yet more than one commentator has complained that he isn’t “black enough,” by which they may mean that his complexion isn’t dark enough, or that he was raised by whites, or that his African father provided him with no heritage in North American slavery, or that he doesn’t sufficiently align himself with the policies of a certain portion of African-American political leadership.

The problem with race as Americans understand it is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a brutal fact of life for millions of citizens, and an inescapable problem for the rest, but it is also, as Ariela J. Gross writes in her densely researched “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” a “moving target,” whose definition and meaning is always in flux. Many of us can avoid encountering this strange truth in the imprecise realms of cultural and social life, but when it comes to the law, imprecision just doesn’t cut it. Gross’ book, a history of cases in which people have challenged their official racial designation, eloquently demonstrates just how difficult it can be to say what race—mine, yours, anybody’s—actually consists of…

Read the entire article here.