Mixed Race Studies

Husband And Wife Duo Paved The Way For Blacks In Diplomacy [Interview with Adele Logan Alexander]

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2010-02-10

Michel Martin, Host of Tell Me More

with

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Tell Me More continues its Black History Month series with a conversation with Adele Logan Alexander. Alexander is professor of history at George Washington University and a member of the National Council on the Humanities. She’s also author of “Parallel Worlds,” a new book that details the lives of married couple William Henry Hunt and Ida Gibbs Hunt. William Henry Hunt was the first African-American to have a complete career in U.S. diplomacy; Ida Gibbs Hunt was an intellectual on world issues.

…MARTIN: And I have to ask you a question, which might be a delicate one for some people, which is these were both very light-skinned people.

Prof. ALEXANDER: Yes.

MARTIN: And, you know, this is an issue which has kind of newly surfaced because of, you know, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments about Senator Obama, or rather President Obama’s complexion. But I do want to ask whether these two people moved in the world as African-Americans, or were they seen as white? Were they passing?

Prof. ALEXANDER: I am convinced, and many other sources that I quote in this book are convinced that one of the reasons he lasted so long with the State Department was that they really weren’t quite 100 percent sure. But one of the tricky points with this comes when what do you do when people simply assume in a world where you don’t think in the middle of France, where certainly the local people didn’t run into African-Americans all of that time – here is this sophisticated man, here is this consul who likes to do sporting things and ride horses and eat fine food and wine. He is not part of their image of what a black man is supposed to be. And, of course, in France a lot of the things that black people were pictured as had to do with their colonial visions, and they didn’t fit this picture…

 Listen to the interview and/or read the transcript here.

Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926

Vintage Press an imprint of Random House
1999
720 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-75871-6 (0-679-75871-2)

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Winner for the top non-fiction prize of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author’s own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans–both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War and married a recently freed slave, Alexander shows three generations of Bonds as they take chances and break new ground.

From Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from Herman Melville‘s New England to the Jim Crow South, from urban race riots to the battlefields of World War I, this fascinating chronicle sheds new light on eighty crucial years in our nation’s troubled history. The Bond family’s rise from slavery, their interaction with prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and their eventual, uneasy realization of the American dream shed a great deal of light on our nation’s troubled heritage.

See Adele Logan Alexander of speak about tracing her racial identity through her family roots in her book “Homelands and Waterways” in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show from 1999-10-26 here.

Black History Month play explores interracial issues

Orlando Sentinal
2010-02-20

Rosalind Jennings, Special To The Orlando Sentinel

Leesburg, [Florida] – Dolores Sandoval’s paternal grandmother was an African slave on a plantation, and that ancestor’s father was the white plantation owner.

So she was mixed racially – an “octoroon,” which is one-eighth African.

“Her father owned the plantation,” Sandoval said. “She was freed by the Civil War.”

In celebration of Black History Month, Sandoval will perform a play that traces her ancestry on both sides as they struggle with issues of race and especially the mixing of races and ethnicities. It will take place at 6 p.m. Monday at the Leesburg Public Library. The play is part of a series of lectures on global awareness sponsored by Beacon College in Leesburg.

“My family is interracial, bi-racial, tri-racial, quad-racial…right through to today,” said Sandoval, a Canadian resident.

The one-hour play, “Coloured Pictures in Family Frames,” will include Sandoval’s ancestors as characters in short episodes that will fit together to tell her family’s story. It will have 20 characters, with Sandoval’s narration being the strongest element as she explains her ancestors’ predicaments and struggles…

Read the entire article here.

Socially Embedded Identities: Theories, Typologies, and Processes of Racial Identity among Black/White Biracials

Sociological Quarterly
Volume 43 Issue 3, (2002)
Pages 335 – 356
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2002.tb00052.x

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Current research on racial identity construction among biracial people derives primarily from small convenience samples and assumes that individuals with one black and one white parent have only two options for racial identity: “black” or “biracial.” Rockquemore’s (1999) taxonomy of racial identity options is used as a framework to synthesize existing research and to generate hypotheses that are explored using survey data from a sample of 177 biracial respondents. The findings support a multidimensional view of racial identity by illustrating that biracial people make various identity choices, albeit “choices” that are differentially available due to an individual’s structural iocation.

Read the entire article here.

Public Categories, Private Identities: Exploring Regional Differences in the Biracial Experience

Social Science Research
Volume 35, Issue 3, September 2006
Pages 555-576

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Empirical research on multiraciality and the development of richer models of racial identity have increased in the last decade. Increased attention to such phenomena has lead to the “check all that apply” modification to the 2000 Census—an official recognition of an historical reality not before reflected on the United States’ Census. However, “identity” and “identification” are different phenomena. Using Place-level data from Census 2000 as well as data from the Survey of Biracial Experience (Rockquemore and Brunsma, 2001), this paper will reveal the geographic distribution of black–white biracial individuals via the Census and compare it to the geographic distribution of biracials’ racial self-understandings from survey methods. The findings illuminate the multifaceted relationship between public categorization and private racial identification. Finally, the implications for utilizing the new Census data for studying black–white and other mixed populations are considered.

Article Outline
1. Introduction
2. Research on mixed-race identity: the case of black–white biracials
3. Methodologies
3.1. Census 2000 data
3.2. The survey of biracial experience
3.3. Measurement of key variables
3.3.1. Biracial identity
3.3.2. Census 2000 identification (South and East samples only)
4. The distribution of mixed-race individuals: the census results
5. Geographic differences in the survey of biracial experience
6. Racial identification versus racial identity
7. A brief thought experiment
8. Discussion and conclusion
Acknowledgements
References

Read the entire article here.

What Does “Black” Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization

Critical Sociology
Vol. 28, No. 1-2 (2002)
pages 101-121
DOI: 10.1177/08969205020280010801

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

The “check all that apply” approach to race on the 2000 census has ignited a conceptual debate over the meaning and usefulness of racial categories. This debate is most intense over the category “black” because of the historically unique way that blackness has been defined. Though the lived reality of many people of color has changed over the past three decades, we question whether the construct black has mirrored these changes and if “black” remains a valid analytic or discursive unit today. While black racial group membership has historically been defined using the one-drop rule, we test the contemporary salience of this classification norm by examining racial identity construction among multiracial people. We find that that the one-drop rule has lost the power to determine racial identity, while the meaning of black is becoming increasingly multidimensional, varied, and contextually specific. Ultimately, we argue that social, cultural and economic changes in post-Civil Rights America necessitate a re-evaluation of the validity of black as social construct and re-assessment of its’ continued use in social science research.

Read the entire article here.