Mixed Race Studies

New NAACP Leader Looks Ahead

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2008-05-20

Michel Martin, Host

Benjamin Jealous is the new president of the NAACP. Jealous, a former news executive and lifelong human rights activist, discusses his new post and the ever-changing role of the NAACP in the civil rights movement.

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I’m Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. In a moment, the Mocha Moms on going green as a family. They’ll talk about ways to get started. And things never to say to Asian-American colleagues. We start our series on how to be mindful of the sensibilities of others in our increasingly diverse workplaces.

But first, one of the country’s oldest civil rights organizations gets a new leader. The NAACP chose a new president on Saturday, 35-year-old human rights activists Benjamin Todd Jealous. He will be the youngest president ever in the history of the 99-year-old civil rights organization. His election comes after the organization tries to recover from a period of internal strife to engage a new generation of members and to refocus its mission. Ben Jealous joins us now to talk about his new post and hopefully a little bit about himself. Welcome to the program. Congratulations.

Mr. BEN JEALOUS (President, NAACP): Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: You’ve had a couple of days to take it all in. Can you describe what it means to lead this historic organization founded by giants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells Barnett.

Mr. JEALOUS: Those two are a big deal to me. I come out of the black press, that’s how I learned how to do what I did for Amnesty [International], and so it’s extremely humbling. You know, at the same time, as a parent of a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl, I’m extremely impatient and want to focus on the now, you know, want to focus on the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline and on making sure that this great association is as important in the 21st century as it was in the last century…

…MARTIN: Your profile is a bit different from past leaders in a number of respects—I mean, the fact that you are not a minister or a politician. One other interesting thing about you is that you are also biracial, as is Barak Obama, as is the lieutenant Governor [Anthony G. Brown] of Maryland, as is the mayor [Adrian Fenty] of Washington.

Mr. JEALOUS: Can I, can I make a small correction there?

MARTIN: Of course.

Mr. JEALOUS: I’m black. You know, the only thing that we have, you know, the only definition that’s out there on the books, if you will, are state laws, and my family is from Virginia. When I was born it said, the law said that you had to be 1/32nd, excuse me, if you were at least 1/32nd of African descent, you were black, end of story. White was an exclusive definition, black was an inclusive definition. I do have biracial parentage but quite frankly…

MARTIN: You don’t consider yourself biracial.

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean, I don’t understand it, I mean the… my grandmother’s much fairer than I am, has straight hair. You know, the reality is that, you know, our family, like most families were sort of created in the Jeffersonian model. You know, we were raped on Virginia plantations, and you know, all of those kids were black.

MARTIN: But your parents weren’t? I mean, that’s not your parents.

Mr. JEALOUS: Yeah, right but what I’m saying is that…

MARTIN: What I’m curious about though is that, is there something, is there an important cultural moment here, or not?

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean you know, yeah it is significant, I think the most significant thing about my parents is that you know, a year after their marriage was illegal, it was made legal because of the work of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund.

You know, my parents—when they were married in Washington, D.C., in 1966, they had to be married there because they couldn’t get married where they lived in Baltimore. When they drove back for the party in Baltimore, people pulled off the side of the road, took off their hat because they thought it was a funeral procession passing, because there was a Cadillac in front of a bunch of cars with their lights on.

So, you know, and my father was disowned not by his two brothers or his mom, but by the entire rest of his family. And his family was in Salem in 1636, and they’re a big family. And they disowned him, not because they didn’t believe that he loved my mom. You know, his great uncle, I mean my great uncle drove out, sat down with them, said we believe that you love this woman, but you know I’m a man, I know a man can love many women, and you need to fall out of love quick or you’re going to be out of this family.

So, you know, the notion biracial I just think is blunt and crude and ahistorical, and to say biracial parentage, of course. I completely, you know, I’ve done more research on my father’s history, I think, on all the white cousins that I’m in touch with, and the ones who didn’t disown us were much in touch with, I love very much, if you know somebody named Jealous it’s probably one of them…

Read the entire transcript here.  Listen to the episode here (00:17:13).

He’s Black, Get Over It

The American Prospect
2008-12-05

Adam Serwer

We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a provocatively titled op-ed for The Washington Post last Sunday, Marie Arana declared that President-elect Barack Obama is “not black” because he’s also “half white.” Arana argues, using a naïve and idealized evaluation of how race operates in Latin America, that identifying Barack Obama as black is “racist,” and “racially backward,” and pleads with the reader to stop “using labels that validate the separation of races.”

If identifying biracial people as black “validates the separation of the races” then there is perhaps no one contributing more to the cause of these neo-segregationists than Barack Obama himself. “My view has always been that I’m African-American,” Obama told Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Turner Trice back in 2004. “African Americans by definition, we’re a hybrid people.” In seeking a validation of her own ideas about race and racial identity, and by casting Obama as the victim of a reductive racial vocabulary, Arenas simply ignores the will of her subject. But racial categories are only unjust insofar as they prevent people from identifying how they wish. Arenas is doing exactly what she is attempting to prevent, forcing Obama into the racial category of her, rather than his own, choosing.

Part of the problem with the American conversation on race is the bizarre license that people take when writing about it on the basis of their own biography. But being “biracial” does not make one an expert on race, or on racial hybridity, any more than being a Republican or a Democrat makes one an expert on politics. So much of the writing on Obama’s racial identity, or on his political impact is muddled by our own subconscious racial desires. We want Obama to mean something specific, either to us or to others, with little regard for how he actually sees himself. As it stands, Arenas seems ill-prepared to talk about how biraciality operates in the African-American context. The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds. Originally, this was a consequence of racial oppression; racist laws that determined that anyone with black ancestry was black. We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

He’s Not Black

The Washington Post
2008-11-30
 
Marie Arana

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

Pennsylvania State University
December 2006
285 pages
AAT: 3343682
ISBN: 9780549992738

Khadidiatou Gueye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
  • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
  • Introduction
  • Black/White Polarization
  • Racial Hybridity
  • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
• Chapter Two
  • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
  • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
  • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
• Chapter Three
  • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
  • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
  • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
• Chapter Four
  • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
  • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
  • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter Five
  • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
  • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
  • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Crossing borders, erasing boundaries: Interethnic marriages in Tucson, 1854-1930

University of Arizona
392 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3398995
ISBN: 9781109735864

Salvador Acosta

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate College The University of Arizona

This dissertation examines the interethnic marriages of Mexicans in Tucson, Arizona, between 1854 and 1930. Arizona’s miscegenation law (1864-1962) prohibited the marriages of whites with blacks, Chinese, and Indians—and eventually those with Asian Indians and Filipinos. Mexicans, legally white, could intermarry with whites, but the anti-Mexican rhetoric of manifest destiny suggests that these unions represented social transgressions. Opponents and proponents of expansionism frequently warned against the purported dangers of racial amalgamation with Mexicans. The explanation to the apparent disjuncture between this rhetoric and the high incidence of Mexican-white marriages in Tucson lies in the difference between two groups: the men who denigrated Mexicans were usually middle- and upper-class men who never visited Mexico or the American Southwest, while those who married Mexicans were primarily working-class westering men. The typical American man chose to pursue his own happiness rather than adhere to a national, racial project.

This study provides the largest quantitative analysis of intermarriages in the West. The great majority of these intermarriages occurred between whites and Mexicans. Though significantly lower in total numbers, Mexican women accounted for large percentages of all marriages for black and Chinese men. The children of these couples almost always married Mexicans. All of these marriages were illegal in Arizona, but local officials frequently disregarded the law. Their passive acceptance underscores their racial ambiguity of Mexicans. Their legal whiteness allowed them to marry whites, and their social non-whiteness facilitated their marriages with blacks and Chinese.

The dissertation suggests the need to reassess two predominant claims in American historiography: first, that Mexican-white intermarriages in the nineteenth-century Southwest occurred primarily between the daughters of Mexican elites and enterprising white men; and second, that the arrival of white women led to decreases in intermarriages. Working-class whites and Mexicans in fact accounted for the majority of intermarriages between 1860 and 1930. The number of intermarriages as total numbers always increased, and the percentage of white men who had the option to marry—i.e., those who lived in Arizona as bachelors—continued to intermarry at rates that rivaled the high percentages of the 1860s and 1870s.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: ARIZONA’S MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE VULNERABILITY OF ILLICIT MARRIAGES
• CHAPTER 2: THE DISCOURSE OF MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE MEXICAN QUESTION
• CHAPTER 3: UNDERMINING MANIFEST DESTINY: AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES
• CHAPTER 4: THE MEXICAN QUESTION REACHES ARIZONA
• CHAPTER 5: INTERMARRIAGES IN TUCSON, 1860-1930
• CHAPTER 6: MARRIAGES BETWEEN MEXICANS AND NON-WHITES
• CHAPTER 7: MARITAL EXPECTATIONS: PROPERTY, NETWORKS, AND VIOLENCE AMONG INTERETHNIC COUPLES
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• REFERENCES

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 5.1. Interethnic unions for men and women of white ancestry and men and women of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.2. Average number of years by which men were older than their interethnic partners, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.3. Occupations of men involved in interethnic relationships, excluding those listed as retired or with no occupation, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.4. White man-Mexican woman couples versus other kinds of interethnic unions between whites and Mexicans, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Figure 5.5. Interethnic unions involving white, Mexican, and mixed (white-Mexican) men and women, 1930. N=279
• Figure 5.6. Ethnic background of the spouses of men of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Figure 5.7. Ethnic background of the spouses of women of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Figure 5.8. Mexican (M) and white (W) households as a percentage of total households in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: white 53.6%, Mexican 36.7%)
• Figure 5.9. Interethnic couples as a percentage of all couples in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 7%; 228 of the 236 couples were between Mexicans and whites)
• Figure 5.10. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of white ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 12%)
• Figure 5.11. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of Mexican ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 18.2%)
• Figure 5.12. Geographic distribution of Mexican households, 1930. N=2304
• Figure 5.13. Single white women as percentage of the total population, United States and Tucson, 1870-1930
• Figure 5.14. Single white women sixteen years and over as a percentage of the total population in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: n=574 or 2.8%, average age=26.6 years; nationwide for whites: 4.9%)
• Figure 5.15. Probable marital status of white men in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=927
• Figure 5.16. Percentage of interethnic unions for white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
• Figure 5.17. Probable marital status of foreign white men involved in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=166
• Figure 5.18. Percentage of interethnic unions for foreign white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
• Figure 6.1. Distribution of black and Chinese residents per census district, Tucson, 1930. Citywide: 484 black men (BM), 477 black women (BW), 152 Chinese men (CM), and 60 Chinese women (CW)
• Figure 7.1. Charges cited in divorce petitions of intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1.1 Interethnic unions involving blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, and descendants of these combinations, Pima County, 1860-1930
• Table 5.1. Population, couples, and single men and women, Tucson, 1860-1880
• Table 5.2. Interethnic couples as percentages of all couples, Tucson, 1860-1880
• Table 5.3. Population, households, and single white women, Tucson, 1900-1930
• Table 6.1. Black men and women and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Table 6.2. Chinese immigrants to the United States by decade, and Chinese residents in Tucson by census year, 1870-1930
• Table 6.3. Chinese adult residents and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
• Table 6.4. Chinese men sixteen years old and over, Tucson, 1880-1930
• Table 6.5. Racial classification for people of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1930
• Table 7.1. Intermarriages and divorce cases among intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Enigma Of Jefferson: Mind and Body In Conflict

The New York Times
1998-11-07

Dinitia Smith

For contemporary historians, Thomas Jefferson has always been an enigma, and the new DNA evidence that he fathered at least one child by his young slave Sally Hemings simply deep ens the mystery of the man. On the one hand, Jefferson was the author of some of the most glorious sentences in the English language, his ringing affirmation of the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence. On the other, he was a slaveholder who wrote some of the vilest sentiments of racism in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785. Blacks, Jefferson wrote, have “a very strong and disagreeable odor,” they are incapable of uttering more than “a plain narration.” Jefferson also said that racial amalgamation “produces a degradation… to which no one can innocently consent.”

Most historians now believe that his relationship with Hemings probably endured for many years, if not from 1787, when Hemings, then 13 or 14, arrived in Paris as a “nurse” to Jefferson’s daughter.

Now that the new evidence is in, how can the inconsistencies in Jefferson’s character be explained?…

…But how could Jefferson have sustained a relationship with Hemings that may have lasted for 38 years if he thought that black people smelled, that they were stupid and childlike? “In general, in order to retain someone in slavery, you have to dehumanize them,”  said Edmund Morgan, author of “American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.”  “It was a standard thing that went with slavery.” 

Jefferson was also surrounded by examples of sexual relationships between masters and slaves. He had witnessed the relationships of two men he deeply admired, his father-in-law, John Wayles, and his law professor, George Wythe, with enslaved women.

Another reason Jefferson may have been able to reconcile his relationship with Hemings with his opposition to miscegenation, Ms. Gordon-Reed points out in her book, was that Hemings was his wife’s half sister, the daughter of John Wayles and his slave consort. Jefferson had been devastated by his wife’s death, and he had promised her he would never remarry. Perhaps Hemings, who was known to be beautiful, bore some of his wife’s characteristics.

But perhaps most important, Hemings, under Jefferson’s notions of race mixing, may have been in some way “white”  in his eyes. Indeed, in the 1830 census of Monticello, Hemings was listed as white. Jefferson also believed that blacks became “white”  when they had a certain amount of white blood in them, a theory he illustrated once in a complex mathematical chart drawn up in a letter to a friend. “Let ‘h’ and ‘e’ cohabit,”  Jefferson wrote, and “the half of the blood of each will be q/2 + e/2 +a/8 + A/8…”  He concluded that the more white blood they had, the more “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind.” …

Read the entire article here.