Mixed Race Studies

“Mixed Race, White Mother: Love and Identity in the Age of Obama”

8th Floor, Raymond Hall
State University of New York, Potsdam
2011-03-22, 16:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Traci Fordham-Hernandez, Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
St. Lawrence University

Part of the SUNY Potsdam Women’s and Gender Studies Anne R. Malone Lecture Series.

For more information, click here.

Trials contesting racial identity illustrate the ways that racial categories have come into being over the course of U.S. history.  Through them we can observe the changing meaning of race throughout our history, and the changes and continuities in racism itself, from the roots in a slave society up through the twentieth century.  Drawing lines between “races” determined not only who could be free but also who could be capable of citizenship.  Thus the trials of racial identity became trials about the attributes of citizenship for the men and women who were their subjects.

Gross, Ariela J. 2008. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. page 7. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

The Marrow of Tradition: Electronic Edition

Boston; New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
329 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Kathy Graham
Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Partial summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

…Chesnutt’s ambitious and complex novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was based on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, which some of Chesnutt’s relatives survived. This event left a considerable number of African Americans dead and expelled thousands more from their homes. Set in the fictional town of Wellington, The Marrow of Tradition centers on two prominent families, the Carterets and the Millers, and explores their remarkably intersected lives. Major Philip Carteret, editor of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, emerges as the unabashed white supremacist who, along with General Belmont and Captain George McBane, seeks to overthrow “Negro domination,” setting in motion those events that culminate in the murderous “revolution.” Dr. William Miller, following his medical education in the North and abroad, has returned home to “his people,” establishing a local black hospital in Wellington. Dr. Miller’s wife, Janet, is the racially mixed half-sister of Major Carteret’s wife, Olivia. Not surprisingly, Olivia Merkell Carteret struggles to suppress the truth of her father’s scandalous second marriage to Julia Brown, his black servant and Janet Miller’s mother. The novel also contains several intricate subplots involving a wide cast of secondary characters: a heroic rebel’s vow to avenge his father’s wrongful death; a staged robbery that results in an ostensible murder; romantic entanglements; and endless doublings and pairings of both white and black characters. Yet throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts the problems afflicting the New South, offering an invective that criticizes the nation’s panicked responses to issues of social equality and miscegenation…

Read the entire summary here.

Read the entire novel here in HTML or XML/TEI format.

A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience

Center for Race & Gender
University of California, Berkeley
2010-12-08

10/5/2010 CRG Forum: Mixed Race/Mixed Space in Media Culture & Militarized Zones
“A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience”

Kevin Escudero, Ethnic Studies

This presentation focuses on the developmental trajectory of the portrayal of mixed race people in mainstream media.  Primarily looking at film, but also analyzing other media texts such as photography, stand-up comedy and particular sub-genres of film (Disney, television series, etc.) this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which different forms of media have portrayed mixed race people pre and post-Loving.  While much work has been done on the depiction of mixed race people in media post-Loving, there is a need for such work to be contextualized within the pre-Loving depictions of mixed race.  Furthermore, very little attention has been given to the ways in which pre-1967 depictions of mixed race characters (e.g. the tragic mulatto) oftentimes reflect as well as perpetuated racist stereotypes of mixed race people.  These depictions of mixed race people during the anti-miscegenation era are what I argue, has given rise to the utilization by mixed race people of multiple forms of self-expression available through various media in the post-Loving era.

Listen to the presentation here.

Racial identity in biracial children: A qualitative investigation

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 40, Number 2, (April 1993)
pages 221-231
DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.40.2.221

Christine Kerwin

Joseph G. Ponterotto

Barbara L. Jackson

Abigail Harris

Describes a qualitative study of issues salient in the development of racial identity for schoolchildren of Black/White racial heritage. Semistructured interviews were conducted individually with 9 Black/White biracial children and their parents (a total of 6 families). Major findings from this study tend to run counter to problems conjectured in the counseling and related literature. For example, in contrast to deficit models, participant children and adolescents did not appear to perceive themselves as “marginal” in 2 cultures. The majority of participant children, adolescents, and adults demonstrated sensitivity to the views, cultures, and values of both the Black and White communities. Developmental transitions associated with different ages were identified. Emergent themes yielded hypotheses with implications for future research.

Read or purchase the article here.