Mixed Race Studies

The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
pages 442-449
DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088377

Annabella Bushra
The Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Christopher Bonovitz gives us a rich landscape of the theoretical, historical, and relational aspects of his work with his mixed-race patient. In my response I explore what seems missing: a stronger sense of the patient as a person, more of her own history in her family, more of the clinical back and forth with her therapist, a sense of what is being played out in the transference, and particularly what “passing” is for her. I show how his choices about how to think about her story and how to tell it are oversaturated with awareness of identity and race at the expense of the basic human relationship. In the face of such racial anxiety, there is a pull to rely too strongly on countertransference as a way to gain privileged access to knowledge about the other. I attribute many of these problems to the inescapable power of race in our culture. Furthermore, I address the themes of hatred, silence, secrecy and transgression as they relate to the history of transgenerational trauma for this patient and invite our broadening our awareness about how they play out in the therapeutic process. We are faced with the difficult, yet the essential task of holding and living out the patient’s anger and outrage at the racial hatred that has been endured.

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Biracial Females’ Reflections on Racial Identity Development in Adolescence

Journal of Feminist Family Therapy
Volume 18, Issue 4 (February 2007)
pages 53 – 75
DOI: 10.1300/J086v18n04_03

Karia Kelch-Oliver
Department of Counseling and Psychological Services
Georgia State University

Leigh A. Leslie, Associate Professor and Graduate Director
Department of Family Studies
University of Maryland

As the number of biracial youth grows, understanding their experience becomes increasingly important. A qualitative study was conducted to learn about the experience of racial identity development in biracial adolescent females. Nine Black-White biracial college-age women participated in focus groups, reflecting on their adolescence. Results indicated the most prevalent experience was a feeling of being marginal between two cultures. Further, competing messages over standards of beauty in the two cultures complicated the normal identity struggle of adolescence. Implications for parents and practitioners include recognizing the unique issues biracial girls experience and how race and gender combine to affect their identity development.

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Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
pages 426 – 441
DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088021

Christopher Bonovitz
William Alanson White Institute; New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis

The author uses contemporary psychoanalytic theory in further understanding the negotiation of conflict and dissociation in biracial patients who are both African-American and White. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who have made efforts to navigate the relationship between inner and outer worlds in our understanding of race from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines the relationship between race, culture, and internalized self-other relationshow they interact with each other and impact splitting and dissociative processes among self-states. The author argues for a notion of the unconscious as one that contains historical trauma related to race relations that influences the developing capacity to sustain internal conflict between opposing self-states borne out of this trauma. The author shows how society works against the integration of racialized self-states and interferes with the capacity to contain conflict. Through an extended clinical vignette from an analysis of a mixed-race patient, the author looks at the interplay of self-states between a White analyst (author) and a mixed-race patient (African-American and White) as manifested through a series of enactments and the unconscious mating between dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The author argues that the analyst’s engagement of his or her own dissociated self-states and containment of internal conflict is critical to aiding the patient in moving toward greater integration.

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Myth of Post-Racial America: Biracial novelist says America still has a long way to go

Northwestern University
News Center
2010-03-08

Wendy Leopold, Education Editor

EVANSTON, Illinois — In a speech titled “The Myth of Post-Racial America,” writer Danzy Senna warned members of the packed audience in Fisk Hall against the urge to view America as having moved past issues of privilege, race and class.

Delivering the annual Leon Forrest Lecture last week, Senna, who is biracial, called such thinking “a dangerous impulse” that seeks to “stop conversation” about racism and genocide that are at the very heart of American history and culture…

…Senna, whose novels and memoirs address biracial and multiracial identity, is the daughter of a Boston blue-blood mother and a black father who grew up “dirt-poor” in the Deep South. She won acclaim for her debut novel, “Caucasia,” which told the story of biracial sisters growing up in the 1970s in racially charged Boston…

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Couple finds a more than a century old gravestone

Beaumont Enterprise
2009-12-13

Kyle Peveto

Beneath a tool shed behind her house, Mallary Sanders and her fiance found a 118-year-old piece of history they are begging someone to take.

Last weekend, Sanders’ fiance, Justin Trusty, 24, was cleaning beneath the pier-and-beam shed when he came across the intact gravestone of a woman who died in 1891.

He told Sanders, 23, he found something that “will scare you.”

“I wasn’t at all scared,” Sanders said. “I didn’t think there was a grave under there. Now, if I had felt weird about the house….”

The couple had no idea what to do with the stone.

“I just wanted it to go back to where it belongs,” Trusty said.

The gravestone stands about 2-feet tall and is specked with mud from lying flat on the ground. Carved marble reads: in memory of DELIEDE, wife of Wm Ashworth. Deliede died June 27, 1891, at 85, according to the gravestone…

…The Ashworth family name has a well-recorded history in Jefferson and Orange counties. During the Republic of Texas and after statehood, the mixed-race Ashworth family owned thousands of acres of land and large cattle herds in an area that did not welcome free people of color.

“What I thought was interesting was their ability to prosper in a place like Texas that made it illegal to be a free black,” said Jason Gillmer, a professor of law at Texas Wesleyan University who has studied the family…

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Shades of Gray: The Life and Times of a Free Family of Color in Antebellum Texas

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

2009-08-13
64 pages

The history of race and slavery is often told from the perspective of either the oppressors or the oppressed. This Article takes a different tact, unpacking the rich and textured story of the Ashworths, an obscure yet prosperous free family of color who came to Texas beginning in the early 1830s. It is undoubtedly an unusual story; indeed in the history of the time there are surely more prominent names and more famous events. Yet their story reveals a tantalizing world in which–despite legal rules and conventional thinking – life was not so black and white. Drawing on local records rather than canonical cases, and listening to the voices from the community rather than the legislatures, this Article emphasizes the importance of looking to the margins of society to demonstrate how racial relations and ideological notions in the antebellum South were far more intricate than we had previously imagined. The Ashworths never took a stand against slavery; to the contrary, they amassed a fortune on its back. But their racial identity also created complications and fissures in the social order, and their story ultimately tells us as much about them as it does about the times in which they lived.

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