Mixed Race Studies

Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London

Cambridge University Press
January 1982
184 pages
216 x 140 mm, 0.24 kg
Paperback ISBN: 9780521297691

Susan Benson

In a society where race is a significant component of social identity and exerts an important influence on social relationships, the problems faced by couples who enter into ‘mixed’ marriages are especially difficult. The book is a study of the personal histories and everyday lives of a small number of interracial families living in and around Brixton, south London, in the early 1970s. Dr Benson sets the circumstances that confront these families within the context of wider British attitudes about race, colour and miscegenation as they developed over time. She argues that couples are obliged to make a continual series of choices between ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the course of their everyday lives. Through a discussion of these choices and of the factors which lead individuals to enter into a marriage which could be regarded with some disapproval, the book explores how people in London thought and felt about race, colour and social identity. It will be of interest to all teachers and students studying race relations, as well as to social and community workers, school teachers and administrators concerned with race relations and the inner city.

Table of Contents

• List of maps and diagrams
• Preface
• 1. Racial intermarriage in England
• 2. The pattern of interracial unions in England today
• 3. Introducing Brixton and the borough of Lambeth
• 4. The social world of Brixton
• 5. The dynamics of interracial marriage choice
• 6. Coping with opposition: the reactions of family and friends
• 7. The construction of a domestic world
• 8. The construction of a social universe
• 9. Living in a divided community
• 10. Parents and children
• 11. Concluding remarks
• Appendix 1. The research project: development and methodology
• Appendix 2. The calculation of births by parental ethnic origin
• References
• Index

Race Passing and American Individualism

University of Massachusetts Press
February 2003
176 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand)

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture

In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for white embody a paradox. By virtue of the “one drop” rule that long governed the nation’s race relations, they are legally black. Yet the color of their skin makes them visibly-and therefore socially-white.

In this book, Kathleen Pfeiffer explores the implications of this dilemma by analyzing its treatment in the fiction of six writers: William Dean Howells, Frances E. W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Although passing for white has sometimes been viewed as an expression of racial self-hatred or disloyalty, Pfeiffer argues that the literary evidence is much more ambiguous than that. Rather than indicating a denial of “blackness” or co-optation by the dominant white culture, passing can be viewed as a form of self-determination consistent with American individualism. In their desire to manipulate personal identity in order to achieve social acceptance and upward mobility, light-skinned blacks who pass for white are no different than those Americans who reinvent themselves in terms of class, religion, or family history.

In Pfeiffer’s view, to see race passing as a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of individualism is to invite richer and more complex readings of a broad range of literary texts. More than that, it represents a challenge to the segregationist logic of the “one drop” rule and, as such, subverts the ideology of racial essentialism.