Mixed Race Studies

Daniel Sharfstein wins 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Vanderbilt Law School News
Vanderbilt University
2012-03-16

Daniel Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for his sensitive account of the fine line people of mixed race have tread in the United States since the nation’s beginning, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011).
 
“[The Invisible Line] makes real the fact that, not so long ago, American citizens were forced into hiding their lineage and identity just to live free in this democracy, the perils and sense of loss, no matter which road they chose, and the price being paid even to this day by their descendants, and by extension, all of us,” the judges said in a press release issued by Columbia and Harvard universities.
 
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, established in 1998 in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist J. Anthony Lukas, is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognizes excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of its namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. Sharfstein will receive the award prize of $10,000 on May 1, 2012, at a ceremony at Harvard University.

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Sharfstein chronicles the history of three African American families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities, starting in the 17th century. The book is a result of Sharfstein’s research on the legal history of race in the United States and on dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their racial identity and create new lives. He found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans and document their migration across the racial divide…

Read the entire new release here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

The Penguin Press
2011-02-17
416 pages
6.14 x 9.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.

In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Three American families’ stories…

The Gibsons
The Gibsons were among the first free people of color in seventeenth-century Virginia, most of whom were free because their mothers were English and by law slavery followed the status of the mother. In the early l700s, as Virginia’s laws made it increasingly difficult for free blacks to own property and earn a living, the Gibsons left the colony for the southern frontier. When the Gibsons reached South Carolina in the 1730s, the colonial assembly worried.that they had come to organize a slave revolt. But after personally interviewing the family, the colonial governor granted them hundreds of acres of land in a Welsh and Scots-Irish community. After one generation they were neither black nor white-they were planters. In the nineteenth century, they rose to the heights of the Southern aristocracy. They sent their sons to Yale and had vast holdings of land and slaves near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lexington, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Gibsons were rebel officers, powerful opponents of Reconstruction, and leaders of the New South.’ One became a United States Senator from Louisiana.

The Spencers
The Spencers’ story begins in the Appalachian Mountains. In an area that had more slaves and more free blacks than anywhere else in eastern Kentucky-largely because of a bustling salt mining industry there in the early 1800s-two free men of color began having children with a pair of white sisters who had recently moved from South Carolina. Shortly before one man, George Freeman, was prosecuted for interracial sex, the other man, Jordan Spencer-possibly Freeman’s brother or son-moved with his family one hundred miles deeper into the mountains. Even though he was visibly dark-skinned, his new community in Johnson County, Kentucky, decided that he could be white. His family hovered on the line between black and white for the rest of the century, farming and logging in a mountain hollow before heading into the coal mines.

The Walls
The Walls trace their roots to a wealthy plantation owner in Rockingham, North Carolina. Stephen Wall never married, but he had children with three of his slaves, In the 1830s and 1 840s, he freed his children and sent them to Ohio to be raised by radical Quaker abolitionists. He bought land for them, generously supported their education at places like Oberlin College, and willed them a lot of money. No one knows why. He kept their mothers in bondage. The children became ardent abolitionists and served in the Union Army and Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War, several moved to Washington, D.C., where they fought for civil rights and women’s rights and raised their families to expect nothing less than equality. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, their children disappeared into the white world.

Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line: Collected Stories

Penguin Classics
June 2000
304 pages
5.23 x 7.59in
Paperback ISBN: 9780141185026

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Edited by:

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Unlike the popular “Uncle Remus” stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt’s tales probe psychological depths in black people unheard of before in Southern regional writing. They also expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence, and moral compromise.

This important collection contains all the stories in his two published volumes, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, along with two uncollected works: the tragic “Dave’s Neckliss” and “Baxter’s Procustes,” Chesnutt’s parting shot at prejudice.

An Odd Sense of Color

Toulouse Street: Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans
2012-03-24

Mark Folse

OK, I just have to say it: it was Odd that three of the four panelists on the Tennessee Williams Festival panel New Orleans Free People of Color were white. The garrulous playwright John Guare tried to steal the show and not in a good way, and managed to annoy mystery writer Barbara Hambly when she disagreed with him but wouldn’t stop talking long enough to let her say her piece. Guare put his hand on the back of her chair at some point and it was funny to see Hambly leaning away from him to the point of tipping over.

Guare is the author of a successful Broadway play A Free Man of Color, Hanbly has penned a dozen mysteries featuring the Creole private detective Benjamin January, and the panel was rounded out by Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America and Gregory Osborne, a child of the Creole diaspora to Los Angeles in the post-World War II period and an expert on the subject who manages the archives at the New Orleans public library.

Sharfstein and Osborne thankfully stole the show away from Guare. Sharfstein’s book drew out of a a stint of volunteer work in South Africa where he met a Black woman who had been registered as Colored (of mixed race) by a census taken who was a friend of the woman’s father. He recounted a fascinating tale of a couple prosecuted f under South Carolina’s miscegenation laws, a charge from which they were exonerated after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that it was impossible to determine if the woman’s grandfather had himself been pure Black, which would have made her an octaroon and invalidated the marriage…

Read the entire article here.

James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of the Passing Novel

American Literature
Volume 84, Number 1 (March 2012)
pages 1-29
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-1540932

Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Sanborn’s essay seeks to demonstrate that The Headsman, an overlooked 1833 novel by James Fenimore Cooper, is an allegory of racial passing. After showing that the dominant aim of this melodrama about a Swiss executioner’s family is to critique white American prejudice against African Americans, and that it does so by dramatizing the consequences of passing for three members of that family, Sanborn considers the implications of the fact that the end of the novel seems to reverse, or at least neutralize, that critique. Although Cooper is quite serious about the antiracist message of the novel, the involutions of its ending suggest that by impersonating characters whom he thinks of as light-skinned black people passing as white, Cooper seeks imaginative pleasures just as much as, if not more than, he advances political aims. It is worth considering, Sanborn concludes, whether the same may be said of other passing novels—whether the painful secret keeping of literary passers is, for writers and readers alike, more pleasurable than we have imagined.

Read or purchase the article here.

Exploring Prejudice, Miscegenation, and Slavery’s Consequences in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 3 (2011)
5 pages

Steven Watson
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

This research paper analyzes Mark Twain’s use of racist speech and racial stereotypes in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. Twain has often been criticized for his seemingly inflammatory language. However, a close reading of the text, supplemented by research in several anthologies of critical essays, reveals that Twain was actually interested in social justice. This is evident in his portrayal of Roxana as a sympathetic character who is victimized by white racist society in Dawson’s Landing, Mississippi during the time of slavery. In the final analysis, Twain’s writing was a product of the time period during which he wrote. This knowledge helps students understand the reasons behind Twain’s word choices, characterization, and portrayal of race.

In his novel Puddn’head Wilson, Mark Twain uses racist speech and ideology to examine slavery’s consequences and make a plea for the elevation of the black race. Roxana, the true protagonist and an obviously sympathetic character, appears to be a white supremacist. This is a logical contradiction. It is one of many contradictions that lend the book its complexity and make it challenging to interpret. Roxana has a dual nature in more ways than one. She is smart yet always loses. She is committed to her own survival while being filled with self-loathing. She is free and relishes her freedom, yet can be bought and sold at any time.

The basic plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson involves Roxana, a house slave of Percy Driscoll living in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. She gives birth to a child on the same day that Driscoll’s wife does. Fearing her child will be sold down the river, Roxana switches the two babies in their cribs so that her son will be raised as Driscoll’s son and heir. She is able to do this because both she and her son are of mixed race and can pass for white (Twain 15). When the children become adults, one is accused of murder. Only the title character, a disgraced young lawyer, is able to sort out the identities and identify the murderer…

Read the entire article here.

In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011
pages 143-157
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0024

Johanna M. Wagner
Maastricht University

Feeling her colour heighten under the continued inspection, she slid her eyes down. What, she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? Had she, in her haste in the taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly she felt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak of powder somewhere on her face. She made a quick pass over it with her handkerchief. Something wrong with her dress? She shot a glance over it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

—Nella Larsen, Passing

In a book where the protagonist prides herself in knowing who she is, the final question in the epigraph above is indicative of Irene Redfield’s willful self-ignorance. It is also a reasonable question readers have had about the protagonist and her relationship with the notorious Clare Kendry. What was it between the two women that in the end warrants Clare’s demise? The answer to this question lies somewhere within Irene’s need for ontological certainty—sureness in the knowledge of her own being—that begets security in every aspect of her life. Irene’s security is based on, among other things, stasis. When we meet her, Irene has already meticulously defined and secured her concepts of race and sex and relegated them to their respective compartments in her psyche, never to be revisited. For revisiting either of these ideas would surely breach the serene outlook she entertains about her life. It is her resolve to maintain security that drives the action of the novel and will illuminate what it “was” in Clare that incites such anxiety.

On the roof of the Drayton, unsure of why she elicits a stranger’s scrutiny, Irene responds to the stubborn stare by inspecting herself, mentally running through a list of possible reasons for this unsettling attention (Larsen 149). Her mind whirls as she attempts to pinpoint what it is about her appearance that might be worthy of this penetrating gaze. It is not until after she has exhausted the list of possible material/physical anomalies that she finally resolves to ignore the woman and “let her look!” (149). Ironically, however, foreshadowed by her heightening “colour,” at length Irene suspects “it” may be something less visual, less tangible than her hat, makeup, or dress: “Gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed. Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (150). This early scene is indicative of Irene’s incongruous character. She prides herself in her bourgeois participation toward racial uplift, and yet race does not cross her mind until there is no other alternative. It is a remarkable juxtaposition between the title of the novel Passing, which implies race as no less than the major theme, and the absentminded protagonist who pinpoints the issue only after she has ruled out all else. It is no wonder criticism of Passing has struggled with its importance. Because Irene’s interest in race proves sparse and erratic, the reader may resist its significance to the novel, and certainly to Irene, altogether.

Ambiguity surrounding the issue of race is not the only thing vague in Larsen’s novel. The book has a penchant for opacity: the unreliable narrator, the conflation of protagonist with antagonist, the shocking and uncertain ending; critics have been flustered by this murkiness since its publication. For example, in his 1958 book The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone dismisses the novel as Larsen’s “less important” one, preferring Larsen’s other work Quicksand (101). His dismissive attitude is illustrated through his irritation by certain structural features in Passing. For Bone, “a false and shoddy denouement prevents the novel from rising above mediocrity” (102). Hoyt Fuller has similar concerns; in his introduction to the 1971 publication of Passing, he asserts that Larsen’s “deliberate scene setting” is reminiscent of a “mediocre home magazine story teller” (18). Because these critics position the work within the realm of the “typical” passing novel (Bone 101) and presume the tragic mulatto myth to explain any social or psychological issues, themes such as “race” are relegated to the background of their criticism while their interests in convention and composition are foregrounded…

Read the entire article here.

Symphony in Black and White: Krazy Kat Kontinued

The Albany Times-Union
Albany, New York
2008-11-20

Alexander Stern

Don’t Touch My Comics: The Times Union Comics Panel takes a critical look at the funny pages.

Some months ago, I wrote an appreciation of George Herriman’s classic strip, Krazy Kat; a strip frequently lauded as one of the greatest achievements in the comics medium. Omitted from that article—whether by design or by accident—was a biographical detail that has become increasingly controversial in recent years. It concerns George Herriman’s racial background. While some might argue that such considerations should be irrelevent in art, it seems particularly pertinent in this specific time and place: It seems only fitting to note—here, in the year 2008—when a man with African heritage has just been elected to the highest office in the land—that Krazy Kat (arguably the greatest American comic strip) was authored by a man with a similar background. It is significant to note, however, that while the world celebrates the election and the history of Barack Obama, the world was never told the history of George Herriman during the artist’s lifetime.

Throughout his life, Herriman’s racial and ethnic background remained shrouded in mystery. His collegues weren’t sure exactly what the olive-complexioned Herriman was. Some of his friends and fellow cartoonists began referring to Herriman as “the Greek.” ”I didn’t know what he was, so I named him the Greek,” recalls cartoonist Tad Dorgan in Jeet Heer’s essay “The Kolors of Krazy Kat,” the introduction to A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy – The Complete Full-Page Krazy and Ignatz: 1935-36 (published by Fantagraphics Books in 2005). Much was also made during Herriman’s life of his devotion to hats. Dorgan again: ”Like Chaplin with his cane, [Herriman] is never without his skimmer. [Cartoonist Harry] Hirshfeld says that he sleeps in it.” Indeed, Herriman was seldom photographed bare-headed. Some of his contemporaries claimed that Herriman “had a growth on the back of his skull. He referred to it as a ‘wen’ and was embarassed to expose it in public.” On the other hand, those candid photos that exist of a hatless Herriman reveal a man with short wavy hair. Herriman himself referred to his hair as “kinky.” Was his refusal to be publicly seen without a hat part of a concious desire for Herriman to “pass” for white?…

Read the entire article here.

Krazy Kat and Racial Identity

Graphic Novels: ENGL 375TT (Spring 2009)
University of Mary Wahsington
2009-02-01

Zach Whalen, Assistant Professor of English
University of Mary Washington

After doing some research on George Herriman, the writer and artist for Krazy Kat, I discovered that there has been a lot of critical analysis applied to this comic looking specifically at racial identity. There seems to be some uncertainty as to Herriman’s ethnicity—his parents were listed as “mulatto” in the 1880 census, his own birth certificate says “colored” but his death certificate says “caucasian.” From what I can tell, Herriman was a person of mixed races, but it seems that he chose to “pass” as white for much of his life. Apparently many have speculated that he wore a hat all the time to cover up his “kinky” hair, which he thought was the only identifiably “black” physical trait that he had…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as White: Anita Hemmings 1897

Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly
Volume 98, Issue 1 (Winter 2001)
Features

Olivia Mancini ‘00

When Anita Florence Hemmings applied to Vassar in 1893, there was nothing in her records to indicate that she would be any different from the 103 other girls who were entering the class of 1897. But by August 1897, the world as well as the college had discovered her secret: Anita Hemmings was Vassar’s first black graduate — more than 40 years before the college opened its doors to African Americans.

In the late 19th century, Vassar’s atmosphere might have been best described as aristocratic. Since its opening in 1861, the prestigious women’s school had catered almost exclusively to the daughters of the nation’s elite. Had Hemmings marked her race as “colored” on her application, her admittance to the college most certainly would have been denied.

“She has a clear olive complexion, heavy black hair and eyebrows and coal black eyes,” a Boston newspaper wrote of a 25-year-old Hemmings in August 1897. “The strength of her strain of white blood has so asserted itself that she could pass anywhere simply as a pronounced brunette of white race.”

And pass she did, until her white roommate voiced suspicions about Hemmings’ background to her own father only a few weeks before the class was due to graduate.

The father hired a private investigator to travel to Hemmings’ hometown of Boston. There it was discovered that homemaker Dora Logan and janitor Robert Williamson Hemmings had conspired with their daughter to keep her race a secret…

Read the entire article here.