Mixed Race Studies

The Hudson River School via Cincinnati

Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit
Kingston, New York
2011-05-28

Sparrow

“History can be blind,” observes Joseph D. Ketner II, curator of “Robert S. Duncanson: ‘the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons,’” an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill. Duncanson (1821-1872) was an African-American landscape painter, once highly regarded, now almost entirely forgotten.
 
Born a freedman in Seneca County, New York, Robert Duncanson moved as a youth to Michigan. At the age of 16 he apprenticed to a house painter, then briefly began his own painting and glazing business. In 1840, Duncanson resolved to become an artist, relocating to Cincinnati, the largest city in “the West.” The youth taught himself to paint by copying Thomas Cole paintings and sketching from life. He became an itinerant portraitist, then moved on to nature scenes.
 
By the 1850s in Cincinnati, the two most popular art forms, landscape painting and daguerreotype photography, were dominated by African-American artists. James P. Ball was the preeminent daguerreotypist, Duncanson the top painter. Both men were light-skinned “mulattos,” of mixed race, benefiting from the racial caste system of the time. Cincinnati was a northern city, in a “free state” (one without slavery) whose economy and social outlook were Southern. “Cincinnati was one of the most vociferous abolitionist cities, behind Boston, and it was also one of the most adamant pro-slavery cities, simultaneously—a very, very complex dynamic,” explains Ketner.

In 1855, Duncanson and Ball painted a 600-yard antislavery panorama entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.” This work consisted of a canvas wrapped around two large dowels, which would be unspooled in an auditorium to the accompaniment of an orchestra, with lighting effects and a narrator describing the changing scenes. The “Mammoth Pictorial Tour” traveled the country, advertised as “Painted by Negroes.” Sadly, it is no longer extant…

…It is tempting to interpret Duncanson’s landscapes politically. Those dreamy temples on the shores of rivers—are they images of a utopian world without slavery and racism? Or does that oversimplify them? Duncanson himself once told his son, on the issue of race, “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s Mixed Heritage: A Mother’s Perspective

Beacon Broadside
2008-02-14

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology
City University of New York

It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought?

I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, sitting around the morning meeting at her politically progressive Quaker school, they were talking about how there’d never been a woman president, or a Black president, or a Jewish president. Victoria   piped up: “I could do it; I could be the first of all of them!” Now that she’s older, I think a presidential career is pretty well out for Victoria—the first multi-pierced, Mohawk-wearing, tattooed, electric-bass player president? Probably not. But back when she was in kindergarten, I’d have thought the chances of someone with Obama’s family background becoming president were unimaginably slim.

In case you’ve not seen a news report this year: Obama had an African father and a white American mother—from Kansas, no less, though ultimately her son was raised mostly in Hawaii. Too bad that his mother isn’t here to see this; she died, too young, of ovarian cancer. She did live long enough to see him in the Senate, miracle enough that was! If she was here now, I wonder how she’d be responding to the inevitable media attention: people are blogging about why we’re calling him “Black” rather than “mixed race,”about his “white heritage,”wondering if he is “Black enough,” thinking about his thoroughly unusual and so thoroughly American story…

…The “mixed race” community—powered to a significant (embarrassing?) extent by white mothers of kids who are not white—seeks a unique “mixed” identity, and Obama could be a poster child. But I don’t think we need poster children for mixed identity: we need a world in which a Black man can be president, no matter who his mother is. In such a world, “mixed” wouldn’t matter politically—we could still have our cultural identities, as many as we want, actually, us Americans with our occasional Cherokee grandmother, French great grandfather, Italian immigrant great, great grandmother, and maybe a couple of Jews and the occasional Black ancestor. Celebrating ethnicity can be fun. But race in America is not about fun or celebration: it’s about power. In the world we’ve got, it’s the Black ancestor that sets the identity, because that’s still the racial fault line in America…

Read the entire article here.

Psychoanalysis and Interraciality: Asking Different Questions

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Volume 12, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 205–225
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100121

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Adjunct Research Fellow
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

In this article, the author questions psychoanalytic responses to interracial relationships and subjectivity. She argues that much psychoanalytic discussion on interraciality has been shaped by denial and repression of race, fears of miscegenation, and normative assumptions about the superiority of endogamy. From the perspective of hybridity studies and analytic frameworks predicated on the primacy of relationality, it is time to ask different psychoanalytic questions.

Introduction

In recent years there has been a marked increase in discussion about race, racism, and racialized subjectivity in psychoanalytic literature. One area of “race relations” which requires more attention, however, and a different kind of attention from that which it usually receives, is the area of interracial intimacy. In this article, I raise some questions about psychoanalytic responses to interracial sexual intimacy and interracial subjectivity. I argue that historical psychoanalytic responses to interracial desire, intimacy, and subjectivity were shaped by denial and repression of race, and by (unconscious) fears of miscegenation. In addition, I argue that psychoanalytic writers, past or present, who overtly or implicitly pathologize interracial desire deny full subjectivity to those in interracial relationships and of interracial parentage, inadvertently perpetuate forms of racial segregation, and mandate endogamy as the proper choice of “healthy” individuals. When informed by the insights of hybridity/critical mixed race studies and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks embedded in notions of relationality and intersubjectivity, however, psychoanalytic perspectives can provide important insight into the intersubjective complexities, subtleties, and specificities of interracial desire and intimacy.

The article begins with some background information and discussion on general historical attitudes toward miscegenation, and the relatively recent emergence of hybridity/mixed race studies. I then show how “anti-miscegenism” permeates psychoanalysis, first by looking at the historical picture and the implications of covert racist and colonialist formulations for interracial couples and individuals, and then by examining some contemporary psychoanalytic writing on white desire for black bodies. In order to illustrate and elaborate some key issues, I utilize extracts from my research interviews with women and men who are or have been in intimate interracial relationships.

The interviews I draw on for this article are part of a wider psycho-social research project on transculturation in intimate African and non-African relationships, involving a series of conversations with 20 African and non-African women and men over a period of 2 years. There were several dominant themes in the narratives of my interlocutors, one of which was the responses of family, friends, and observers to their “mixed race” marriages, relationships, and children. I decided in the early stages of the research that I would try to let the data direct theoretical exploration, and this article is one outcome of this process (see also Stopford, 2004, 2006a, 2006b)…

Read the entire article here.

Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada [Review]

Quill and Quire – Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews
October 2001

Hugh Hodges, Associate Professor of English
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario

Lawrence Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, Harper Collins Canada, September 2001, 256 pages, Paperback ISBN: 9780006385080; ISBN10: 0006385087.

With Black Berry, Sweet Juice Lawrence Hill opens an overdue discussion of what racial identity means to Canadians of mixed race. It’s a worthwhile project, but Hill undermines his intentions by trying to address academics and casual readers at the same time. The book falls somewhere between memoir and sociological study, but achieves neither the warmth of the former nor the rigour of the latter.

Hill’s reflections on race are often inconsistent. He pays lip service to the idea that cultures and communities are open-ended, but tends to speak of them as if they were homogenous and closed. He also seems to change his mind several times about whether racial identity is chosen by an individual or something they are born with. He argues that in contemporary Canada people are free to self-identify, but suggests that the person of mixed heritage who chooses not to identify himself as black will find that “his own race [will] take a bite out of his backside.”…

Read the entire review here.

The Loving Story

Silverdocs Documentary Festival (2011-06-20 through 2011-06-26)
Silver Spring, Maryland

Augusta Films, LLC
2011
77 minutes
Thursday, 2011-06-23, 14:45 EDT (Local Time)
Friday, 2011-06-24, 19:30 EDT (Local Time)
Official Website: www.lovingfilm.com

Director and Producer: Nancy Buirski
Producer and Editor: Elisabeth Haviland James
Screenwriters: Nancy Buirski and Susie Ruth Powell

Mildred and Richard Loving, 1965 (Photograph by Grey Villet)

Mildred and Richard Loving never imagined that their unassuming love story would be the basis of a watershed civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional. But in 1967, when this soft-spoken interracial couple are exiled from Virginia—the only home they have ever known—for the crime of merely falling in love and getting married, they feel they have no choice but to fight back. Through extraordinary archival footage, director Nancy Buirski brings this tumultuous history back to life, and anchors it in a timely discourse on marriage equality. — SS

For more information, click here.

Note from Steven F. Riley: My wife Julia and I will attend the Friday, 2011-06-24 screening.

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations: Mixed-Heritage Families in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn, New York

April 2011

Project Description

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) is a public programming series and oral history project about mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, culture, and identity, infused with historical perspective. CBBG is currently in the planning phase (April 2011 – March 2012) and will result in a multi-faceted interpretive website expected to be completed in 2015.

By providing a public forum for conversations about mixed-heritage families, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations will inform the dialogue with historical perspectives on social constructions of race, ethnicity, and community; changes in immigration and citizenship laws and practices; and changes in marriage and partnership laws and practices. Through an interpretive website, online discussions initiated and led by scholars, public programs and events, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) will invite the public to share their own stories, respond to other people’s stories, react to, and learn from scholarly interpretations of these stories…

…Scholarly Advisors

Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Oral History Research Office
Columbia University

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Keren R. McGinity, History
University of Michigan

Suleiman Osman, Assistant Professor of American Studies
George Washington University

Renee Romano, History
Oberlin College

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor of History
Kent State University

Karen Woods Weierman, Associate Professor of English (Literary History)
Worcestor State University

Project Staff

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History
Brooklyn Historical Society

For more information, click here. View the PDF brochure here.

The Madeleine Brand Show with Ulli K. Ryder

The Madeleine Brand Show
KPCC 89.3 FM, Southern California Public Radio
Monday, 2011-06-20, 16:00-17:00Z (09:00-10:00 PDT, Local Time)

Madeleine Brand, Host

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

Ms. Brand and Ms. Ryder will be discussing multiracial students and college admissions.

Listen to the live broadcast here.

Saturday Night with Esme Murphy Featuring Ulli K. Ryder

Saturday Night with Esme Murphy
WCCO News Radio 830
Minneapolis, Minnesota
2011-06-18, 23:00-03:00Z (18:00-22:00 CDT/19:00-23:00 EDT/16:00-20:00 PDT)

Esme Murphy, Host

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

The interview will air this Saturday, 2011-06-18 at 19:05 CDT (Local Time) [20:05 EDT, 17:05 PDT] and Ms. Murphy and Ms. Ryder will also be discussing multiracial students and college admissions.  For wordwide listeners, the broadcast date/time is Sunday, 2011-06-19 at 00:05Z.

Listen to the interview here (00:11:48).

Researcher presents new views on 18th century mixed races and their families

William & Mary: News & Events
2011-06-15

Andrea Davis

Daniel Livesay, NEH postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at William & Mary, presented a paper at the University of Texas in February that discussed the mixed children of white men and black women and their impact on British society in the 18th century. The BBC has contacted him to use some of this new information for a documentary it is working on.
 
His paper focused on racial groups traditionally labeled as creoles in colonial Louisiana and mulattos in the Caribbean. Livesay’s dissertation centered on social hierarchies in 18th century Britain and the family ties of mixed children both born in Jamaica and of British descent.
 
According to his paper, “Preparing to Meet the Atlantic Family: Relatives of Color in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” mixed-race children like Edward Thomas Marsh and James Tailyour and their families’ responses signified a time in Britain where society heatedly debated the issue of blacks as inferior.

“During those two decades, debates on the humanity of the slave trade branched into numerous ancillary arguments over skin color, equality, and racial gradation,” he wrote. “The issues of slavery and family overlapped, with observers commenting on the sexual standards of enslaved families, and the demographic implications throughout the Atlantic of an empire with unrestricted connections between races.”

These children faced a serious dilemma. Like the creoles and mulatto, their place in 18th century British society was uncertain. On the one hand, having mothers of color made them slaves by birth; at the same time, their white father’s heritage gave them freedom. Livesay says they stood between the two social placements set out in British and even colonial society. What determined their place was the amount of acceptance they received from their British relatives…

Read the entire article here.

Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2011-06-13

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

Call it a quarter-life crisis. A change in the winds, perhaps. Maybe it’s my sad stack of rejection letters from graduate schools. Whatever the case may be, of late, I’ve been having a bit of an intellectual, (even vaguely political) existential crisis when it comes to “mixed-race” issues. So, almost two years since I embarked on my self-proclaimed crusade toward a radical engagement with mixed issues, it’s about that time to remind myself of the basics that started it all…

…Mixed-Consciouness: In Search of a Political Education

Political education is crucial and yet, many of us are painfully deficient. For me political education is about developing a critical consciousness- a fancy word for a way of thinking and being and perhaps, most importantly understanding who we are and how we fit (and don’t fit) into wider systems and structures of power, privelege and opression we are all a part of. Since mixed folk have historically never been recognized as legitimate social or political subjects in this country, figuring out who we are let alone how we fit into these systems can be a struggle to say the least.

So how do we politically educate and raise consciousness—individually and collectively? Well, for me it starts with taking a look back into our pasts. Now, the type of reading and understanding of history I’m taking about is not this often random, ahistorical revisionist type that attempts to reclaim “mixed-race” people of the past and present: DuBois was mixed and so is Slash!!!Wooot!!! (though very cool, nonetheless). Our history is there, between the lines of colonial history, Native histories, slavery, U.S. expansion, immigration, Asian-American history, Latina/o & Chicana/o histories,  U.S. military imperialism etc etc.—we’re all there, we are and our ancestors are all part of these histories—even me, with parents who didn’t come to this country until the early 70s. My history is nevertheless tied to immigrant histories and policies that made it possible for my parents to come here, my connection to black, Latin@ and East Indian histories are rooted in my parent’s identities as part of the wider African and Indian diasporas and systems of global colonialism and imperialism that spread millions around the world over centuries and subjected them to the phenomenon of racialization…

Read the entire article here.