Mixed Race Studies

Are We Content to Let Our DNA Define Us?

Diaspora@chinaSMACK
2011-07-12

Ashton J. Liu

A Chinese friend once responded harshly when asked, “Are you Japanese?” by a young child who had approached him on the street. His response struck me as strange. After all, my identity was always a topic of discussion. As a child of a Chinese-American father and Caucasian mother, I looked neither. I have thick dark hair, a long nose, large eyes, and slightly colored skin. In fact, I was more often mistaken for Hispanic or Native American rather than Asian or white. My identity was discussed among close friends, acquaintances, and even with strangers who I bumped into in a bar or with whom I had a brief encounter on the street.

Plus, I got it all the time. Meeting someone for the first time usually meant that he or she might give me that slightly elongated, curious gaze, which was followed by an awkward “I’m sorry..I can’t tell, are you [insert misconceived identity here]?” Or, in contrast, when meeting someone Asian, my appearance wouldn’t merit a second glance, but my last name would always surprise them. “Wait…. why do you have a Chinese last name?” they might ask. In time, I got used to it, like a high school graduate who puts up with questions like “What are you going to major in? What do you want to do when you graduate from college?” You know people are good intentioned and genuinely curious, but when you answer the same question to all your relatives, family friends, teachers and random acquaintances, you still answer out of courtesy, but each time you draw a deeper sigh as you prepare your now well-practiced response…

…This all changed once I set foot in college; there was a blossoming of expression and awareness. Suddenly, we were one. Organizations and clubs formed to challenge preexisting notions of race, and ran discussions, published magazines and held conferences on the multiracial experience. Being biracial went from being a footnote to being something one could flaunt, something fashionable.

Yet strangely, I grew tired of this discussion. I went to one diversity awareness event, and visited the multicultural session, structured as a reenactment of what mixed blood students encountered in high school. I entered a mock cafeteria and students representing the black table, Asian table and white table, and turned you away, saying you weren’t black, Asian or white enough to sit with them. C’mon, I thought, of course some people think like that, but what an over-dramatization….

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Mothering Multiracial Children: Indicators of Effective Interracial Parenting

McGill University
1997
123 pages

Nicolette De Smit

A Thesis Submitted to The School of Social Work Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Master’s Degree in Social Work

The goal of this descriptive/exploratory study was to examine the behavior and attitudes of eleven white and five non-white mothers involved in raising multiracial, preschool-aged, biological children. A theoretical framework based on research carried out with multiracial individuals was used to define interracial parenting strategies that promoted strong racial and personal identities in their children. Through individual interviews, using a questionnaire, an opinion survey, and four vignettes that described racially complex situations, two areas of parenting were examined: contact maintained by mothers with the child’s minority background, and the mothers capacity to effectively problem-solve.
 
Little difference was found between the responses of white and non-white mothers. However, among white mothers, the younger, less educated mothers had considerably more contact with the minority culture than did the older, highly educated mothers. The latter, however, performed significantly better than their younger counterparts in providing responses that displayed more of the attitudes and parenting strategies recommended in previous research.

Read the entire thesis here.

“Suddenly and Shockingly Black”: The Atavistic Child in Turn-into-the-Twentieth-Century American Fiction

African American Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (Spring, 2007)
pages 51-66

J. Michael Duvall, Associate Professor of English
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are signs of black ancestry. These writers thus follow the common understanding of racial interbreeding as tending toward, in Stephen Jay Gould’s parlance, “a ‘blending’ or smooth mixture and dilution of traits” (24). The “natural grandson of a Southern lady, in whose family his mother had been a slave,” Harper writes, “the blood of a proud aristocratic ancestry was flowing through his veins, and generations of blood admixture had effaced all traces of his negro lineage” (239). The blending, mixing, and dilution of African features of interracial characters occur across a wide swath of late 19th-century American fiction and answer to a wide variety of purposes, from the reconciliationist fiction of Lydia Maria Child, whose Romance of the Republic (1867) offers a model of national reconstruction in two generations of loving, moral, interracial couples who have white-skinned children, to the white supremacist tales of Thomas Dixon, whose The Clansman (1905) reifies the myth of the lascivious and tempting nature of black women via their whitened interracial offspring. And, of course, this blending model also creates the conditions for a staple trope of much white and African American fiction of the late nineteenth century and onward: racial passing.

 Yet if the fiction of the time features this “amalgamation” model of heredity as embodied by Latimer (as well as Iola and her brother Harry), it also sees the emergence of a countervailing discourse of interracial heredity the specific effect of which throws a wrench into the mechanics of passing. In Iola Leroy, the eponymous heroine warns the white Dr. Gresham, her first suitor, that should they marry and procreate, her race could be revealed by an “unmistakeab[ly]” black child (117). An undeniable “throw-back” to a black racial past, such a child would result from the supposed process of “atavism” (in Latin, “a great grandfather’s grandfather”). Submerged racial features were believed to skip generations only to recur farther down the family line, rupturing a smooth hereditary narrative of blending and exposing the parent’s “true” race, always black and never white. In many novels and stories, atavism remains only a threat. However, in texts we examine below, atavistic children are actually born. These children range in appearance from simply showing signs of color to manifesting a monstrous, ape-like form, the fancied evidence of a supposed profound and irremediable racial pollution.

We argue specifically that the actual birth of grotesquely atavistic children in fiction, suddenly appearing at the turn of the twentieth century, is both historically bound and distinctly gendered: such children were usually the product of black male/white female sexual relationships that were seen by many whites as particularly threatening to white hegemonies at the historical moment. Various turn-of-the-20th-century authors use racial atavism, structured through a logic of contamination, to consolidate racial identity, maintain the color line, or bolster white supremacist discourse. The unidirectional logic of racial contamination, common throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, fueled white racist propaganda for maintaining distinct racial categories and white hegemonies: black blood, once introduced into a family line, could be diluted, but never removed. Such mongrelization, white supremacists feared, would eventually lead to the disintegration of the white family and, consequently, the white nation. Framing these atavistic children or the threat of their appearance against their more common cousins, the light or white-skinned mulatto figure, we thus argue that they function as a dire warning both to black men of any shade and to white women whose wombs white men needed “uncontaminated” to (re)produce a white nation.

The idea of an apparently other-raced child, Werner Sollors tells us in an indispensable chapter of Neither White Nor Black Yet Both (1997), goes back to antiquity, during which an other-raced child was thought to prove adultery or, alternatively, to figure as a true wonder. In this ancient cultural setting, atavism could result in either a black or white child: such a child might be Natus AEthiopus, a black child birthed by white-appearing parents, or Natus Albus, a white child birthed by seemingly black parents. With one parodic exception, we find no instances of Natus Albus in the fiction of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. (1) Furthermore, according to Sollors, with the advent of a species model of race, the nineteenth century marks a change in attitude toward the idea of Natus AEthiopus, which he summarizes in his chapter’s closing discussion of Robert Lee Durham’s novel, The Call of the South (1900):

In the hands of a racialist radical, the Natus AEthiopus changed into the white horror of horrors. Underneath the Gothic machinery, however, one … recognizes the issues of the past in their transformation: atavism explains a child’s color, but in a cultural context in which it could be asserted that black and white must never be related in a family structure. Wonder is replaced with horror … ; adultery seems to have completely disappeared [as an explanation for atavism]; “essential” racial difference cuts even fully legalized family relations…. (66)

 The present essay builds on Sollors’s work by investigating what, aside from the species-inflected racial science and thinking that he identifies, lies behind this shift from wonder to horror, at the end of the nineteenth century. What, more precisely, governs the appearance in American novels of not just unexpected, dark-skinned babies, but grotesquely atavistic ones, and to what ends?…

…That the myth of atavism emerges in a wide range of novels makes sense, given the period’s fixation on the discourses of blood, the idea of racial purity, and the legally entrenched system of segregation, yet the texts that actually produce atavistic children are in fact striking for their rarity. Indeed, the arguably overwhelming presence of light- or white-skinned mixed-race children in interracial fiction, even in those that include the threat of atavism, prompts us to ask what governs the appearance of those few mixed-race infants who actually show black racial traits. We suggest that these children often materialize within particular narrative constructions. Two turn-of-the-century stories, both again involving racial passing and featuring comparatively mild incidents of atavism, suggest that narrative’s contours. In one, Kate Chopin’s widely-read 1893 short story “Desiree’s Baby,” a presumably white woman commits suicide and infanticide, and in the other, Pauline Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon” (1900), a mixed-race woman survives, but her male child dies. (10) In Chopin’s story, Desiree, herself a woman of “obscure origin,” marries Armand, the son of a respected family, only to produce a baby—a son—who has black racial characteristics. Unclear as to what this appearance could possibly mean, she queries her husband, who replies: “it means that you are not white” (176, 179). Befuddled by this revelation since her complexion is lighter in shade than her husband’s, but accepting his judgment against her, Desiree walks into the swamp with her infant, presumably committing infanticide and suicide. The story ends not here, however, but with Armand’s discovery of a letter written to his father from his long-deceased mother, explaining that Armand has black heritage. This discovery reverses the common narrative construct of the white male/black female coupling. Instead, the story offers us a black male/white female pairing that actually produces in very mild form an atavistic (male) child. (11) Pauline E. Hopkins’s short story “Talma Gordon” (1900) also offers a case of a mildly atavistic child. Although the child issues from the more common white male/black female pairing, the child, who has physical characteristics that identify him as having African heritage, is again male. The child dies from disease while still an infant, while his two older, physically white sisters survive. What we begin to see in these two stories of mild atavism is a gender dynamic that further complicates narrative embodiments of grotesquely atavistic children…

…The manner in which individual authors have engaged the trope of the atavistic child—as evidence of an everlasting barrier between the races, as warning not to transgress or pass over the color line, as strategy for solidifying race categories and white hegemonies–suggests that the trope of the atavistic child functions as the bearer of certain kinds of what Jane Tompkins has called cultural work the functional relation of a piece of literature to its immediate historical conditions and the answer to the question “what kind of work is this novel trying to do?” (38). Throughout the nineteenth century, novels that explored “the race question” did significant cultural work by helping to shape our national politics. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the best-known example of the impact that a novel can have in our cultural imaginary. By the turn of the twentieth century, the novel had perhaps an even greater impact on the public. As Lee Baker explains, “The mass media played an integral role in shoring up the ideological demarcation of the color line. Technological advances and rising literacy rates increased the circulation and decreased the prices of magazines, newspapers, and books. By 1905, stereotypes that had previously been reinforced by folklore or expensive texts were now voraciously consumed by the public in the mass media” (38). The graphic racist novels by whites in the first decade of the twentieth century promulgated negative stereotypes about African Americans, using the atavistic child as a nodal point for articulating the discourses of miscegenation, white supremacy, racial passing, black male/white female sex, the mythic black beast rapist, and lynching. These novels, in essence, reinforced anti-miscegenation sentiment in a particularly unidirectional way to maintain the color line and to deny black civil rights. While white male/black female sex may have been considered immoral–by many people, black and white–it ultimately failed to destabilize cultural hegemonies. Not so with black male/white female sex, which whites considered much more dangerous because it disrupted the reproduction of whiteness. White men, so novels such as Lee’s and Davenport’s conclude, must strenuously guard the white womb against race pollution and perversion, corruptions marked by the birth of a degenerate atavistic child. Punishing black men who dare pollute those wombs works to consolidate whiteness across a North-South regional divide…

….Ironically, women posed one of the greatest dangers to the sanctity of the color line because of their central role in the reproduction of whiteness. White women held the biological key to maintaining and increasing the white race, and thus fortifying white hegemonies because only white women could produce white children. Their race loyalty alone made possible the continuation of white male authority that insured white privilege. If white women’s bodies served as the vessels for reproducing whiteness, they had to remain “pure” from the corrupting taint of blackness. The grotesquely atavistic child that drove its mother to insanity and/or death became a graphic symbol of the punishment of racialized transgression and one that starkly highlights white men’s anxiety over controlling the reproductive powers of white women. Thus, while woman’s importance in cultural production was elevated above other cultural factors, it also remained linked to their racial identity and to their biological role as mother and the age-old attempt to govern female sexuality. The grotesquely atavistic child’s appearance at this moment stems from the same white fear that fueled the industry of lynching in this decade…

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Mediating Blackness: Afro Puerto Rican Women and Popular Culture

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2011-06-14
145 pages

Maritza Quiñones-Rivera

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In my dissertation I discuss how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Inés (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences. In this dissertation I argue that black women are challenging these images as sites for mediating blackness, femaleness, and Puerto Ricanness where hegemony and resistance are dialectical. I integrate a text-based analysis of media images with an audience ethnographic study to fully explore these processes of racial and gender representation. Ultimately, my project is to detail the ways in which Black women respond to folklorized representations and mediate their Blackness by adopting the cultural identity of Trigueñidad in order to establish a respectful place for themselves within the Puerto Rican national identity. The contributions from the participants of my audience ethnography, as well as my own experiences as a Trigueña woman, demonstrate how Black women are contesting local representations and practices that have folklorized their bodies. The women who form part of this study also responded to the pressures of a nation whose official stance is that race and racism do not exist. In addition, I present global and local forces—and in particular commercial media—as means for creating contemporary Black identities that speak to a global economy. By placing media images in dialogue with the lived experiences of Black-Puerto Rican women, my research addresses the multiple ways in which Black identities are (re)constituted vis-à-vis these forces.

CHAPTER 1 “MISSING IN ACTION” RACE, GENDER AND PUERTO RICAN COMMERCIALIZ MEDIA RESEARCH LANDSCAPE

Media and popular culture are powerful venues in which women assert and communicate national and social identities.1 In this light, I contend that Black Puerto Rican women mediate their Blackness by challenging folklorized representations of themselves that are perpetuated in local commercial media and advertising. In the face of a society whose media presents “race” as part of the nation’s past, a fokloric identity, many women adopt a new language of Trigueñidad in order to find a place for themselves within the national landscape. Before I begin this line of research, it is vital to first review representations of race and gender in commercial television and other media in the island…

…Theoretical Framework

Overall, the process of mediating blackness in Puerto Rico is one caught in the dual tensions between the local media‘s inscriptions of black women as folklorized on the one hand, and the influences of U.S. popular culture and additional transnational media on the other. What is crucial here is the understanding that media messages and their representations do not work in a vacuum but form part of a broader social and cultural network, and that media itself is not a monolithic body that operates as a single, unified, controlling entity. Instead, media compose a complex set of production and consumption practices. In the case of Puerto Rico from 2003 to 2006, for instance, the influence of localized media began to dwindle following their purchase by American media conglomerates. A vast majority of television programming now comes from off-shore corporations (for example, telenovelas produced in Latin America) and U.S.-based, Spanish language commercial media. In spite of this narrowing of diversity, it is important to compare Black women‘s representation in one media to racial and gender representations in another. Approaching media from this standpoint allows me to critically combine elements of existing theories in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between various media, Puerto Rican cultural identity, and black identity at the collective and individual levels. More specifically, my work is centrally interested in advertising and the way black women are represented in the Citibank advertisement mentioned above. It will be crucial not to examine advertising in insolation, however, but to also explore the representations of black women in different mass media forms, such as newspapers, television, radio, and Internet. The images of advertisements operate in a system of sign that can never work in isolation from other signs or cultural factors.

Mediating blackness is also a process that necessarily interacts with the commonly-held beliefs and daily practices of racially mixed populations in Puerto Rico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. My dissertation thus explores the production, representation, and consumption of media by populations, and incorporates academic arguments on the shifting roles and boundaries of media in daily life. My central discussion of media accordingly draws upon several fields of academic inquiry, among them media studies, black feminism, body politics, and the study of racial blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, though it is ultimately grounded in cultural studies approaches to media studies.

Among these common conceptions that must be addressed is the dominant notion of Puerto Rico as a culturally unified nation that has produced a racially mixed, democratic society. Representations of this unified Puerto Rican culture are presented in such institutions as museums, the government, the education system and other “official” cultural sites. In response to this collective Puerto Rican cultural identity, forming a racial identity is often a struggle for some non-white Puerto Ricans (See: my autoethnography in Chapter 3), especially when Puerto Rican blackness is represented as folklorized, and when racism is a tacit component of official culture (Warren-Colón, 2003, p.664). Scholars have given only minimal attention to this phenomenon, and to the dismissive or stereotypical treatment of black women‘s bodies through their folklorized representations in popular culture and other media…

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Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 322-341
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0036

Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the “Rhineland Bastard.” Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

University of Notre Dame, Australia
March 2008
328 pages

Derrick Tomlinson

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

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Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when it comes to understanding a multiracial identity and construction.

Beth Frankel Merenstein, “Book Review: Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity,” Teaching Sociology,Volume 39, Number 2 (2011): 214-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0092055X11403292.

Mental Conflicts of Eurasian Adolescents

The Journal of Social Psychology
Volume 5, Issue 3 (August 1934)
pages 402-408
ISSN: 0022-4545 (Print), 1940-1183 (Online)
DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1934.9921608

Linden B. Jenkins

The article presents information on mental conflicts of Eurasian adolescents. In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live. Mixed marriages then began to be looked upon as contrary to tradition and Eurasians became an “ever-present reminder that taboos have been violated and caste integrity threatened.” These Eurasians are generally so marked physically as to set them off from both parents, and, being excluded from either full-blood group, they constitute a third distinct class. One of the great tragedies to the Eurasion personality is the fact that the struggle to adjust himself to his environment results in the capitulation of his “ego.” The “inferior ego” is a most significant problem for the Eurasian adolescent. Hygienic mental adjustment begins at the point where the adolescent is learning the hard lesson that other individuals be- sides himself exist and have rights similar to his own.

In Malaysia there have been European contacts with the native peoples since the early exploration days of the Portuguese and, as a consequence, there is today a hybrid population of about fifteen thousand “Eurasians” in British Malaya alone. They are of a variety of mixtures—the more common type being Portuguese-Malay. Other mixtures are those of the Dutch, British, and Americans with the Malays, Indians, Javanese, and Chinese.

In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live.  At a much…

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Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

Union Institute and University
June 2005
277 pages
AAT 3196614
Publication Number: AAT 3196614
ISBN: 9780542425899

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and Sciences a Concentration in African American – Native American Relations at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio

W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement, ‘The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,’ invokes images of the century’s racial antagonisms between Blacks and whites. However, racial antagonism in Virginia also occurred between African Americans and Amerindians, as the question regarding who was an Indian and who was a Negro became paramount to Amerindian survival. Central to this problem was the enforcement of a law the Virginia General Assembly passed on March 20, 1924, entitled ‘An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.’ This legislation, the first such law to be passed in the United States, was the culmination of Virginia’s three hundred year campaign to insure the ‘purity’ of the white race. Racial purity, in early twentieth-century Virginia, was defined by the absence of African ancestry. Therefore, one could be of Indian-white admixture and remain racially pure. But an Indian-Black admixture, even one drop of black ‘blood,’ and one was transformed from pure to impure, and in jeopardy of being ethnically reclassified. By denying the historical relationship between African and Indian peoples in the Commonwealth, this paradox informed the state recognition process and helped many to successfully maintain their aboriginal status. However, the problem of the color line continues in the twenty-first century because racial integrity remains the dividing factor in African-Indian relations. The following discourse examines the changing state of African-Indian relations in Virginia from the Colonial period to the present. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the United States racial formation project in relation to Africans and Indians; chapter 2 examines Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories concerning African-Indian admixture, racial identity, and their influence on Virginia’s twentieth-century racial purity campaign; chapter 3 examines the historical relationship between African and Indians by tracing the Indian presence in the slave and free ‘colored’ populations of colonial and antebellum Virginia; chapter 4 examines the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, its impact on African-Indian relations, and the debate it provoked among such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; chapter 5 provides a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropological advocates Frank Speck and Helen Rountree, their activism on behalf of the Virginia Tribes, and the ways their advocacy contributed to the racial integrity cause; chapter 6 is a case study which examines Central Point, Virginia, the home of Richard and Mildred Loving (Loving v Virginia), to interrogate race and self identity, namely the self identity of Mildred Loving as an Indian woman; the Epilogue examines the contemporary activism of Virginia residents of mixed African-Indian heritage whose alternative historical consciousness defies racial politics and promotes decolonization, reclamation and empowerment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapters
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia Revisited
  • 3. The Changing State of African and Indian Relations in Virginia
  • 4. Towards State [Un] Recognition: Native Identity and the One Drop
  • 5. The Present State of Virginia Indians: The Predicament of Of Race and Culture
  • 6. “Tell The Court I Love My [Indian] Wife:” Interrogating Race and Self Identity in Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue – Coming Together: Decolonization and Empowerment, Reclaiming Ourselves
• Appendices
  • A. An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
  • B. Loving Marriage license
  • C. Weyanoke Holiday Card
  • Works Cited

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Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

George Washington University
2009-01-31
392 pages

Laura Janet Feller

A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people.

In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan-Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract of Dissertation
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s
• Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State
• Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies
• Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples
• Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Introduction

The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.

Matthew Frye Jacobson

One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, recreated, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.”

Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.”

The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance oftheir Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations?

For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that they have dealt with whites in whose eyes Indians were often both racialized and ethnicized. For tidewater organized Native groups in the period of this study, it seems that their foes wanted them categorized primarily as “racial” groups, and that Virginia Indians fought back on grounds and with weapons that to a large extent reflected the racialized, segregated world in which they lived.

The 1924 law on “racial integrity” was part of a long history of racial legislation in Virginia and throughout the United States designed to create racialized lines in a world where such lines had been blurred since the age of European colonization began. “Miscegenation” law, for example, was solidly entrenched in the English colonies then in the United States, until the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The first ban on “interracial” marriage in the English North American colonies was Maryland’s in 1664. Virginia’s first “miscegenation” law dated from 1691, and it explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals. Before 1924, Virginia laws specified what made someone black rather than defining whiteness. To define “blackness” as a legal matter, Virginia law before 1924 typically expressed and codified racialized identities in terms of numbers of ancestors, or fractions of ancestry. Virginia’s 1924 “racial integrity” law, though, defined legal “whiteness” rather than “blackness.” In doing so, this statute in effect made a matter of explicit law, for the first time in Virginia, the concept of a “one drop rule” for what makes someone legally African American. The sole exception to the whiteness definition in the 1924 law was that a Virginian could be legally white if he or she had no more than “one-sixteenth” Indian “blood” and his or her ancestors were otherwise “white.”

This 1924 statute stands at several intersections in the history of racialist thinking and racism in America. In it, Jim Crow meets “scientific racism” and eugenic thought. As a “miscegenation” law, the statute also illustrates some of the ways in which racialized identities are entwined with conflicts about sexuality. It evidences how constructions of social and cultural identities could connect with, or be contested by, state powers and legal discourses, within the context of the modernizing tendencies of post-World War I governmental policies and programs…

…Starting with 1924 as a focal point, this project looks at Native and “mixed” Native identities as claimed and recorded before and after passage of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity” law. Moving backward into the post-Civil War era and then forward from 1924 into the 1950s, this study explores the impact of Virginia’s 1924 “miscegenation” law on individuals and communities who claimed Native American identities. The 1924 law was a climax of sorts in decades of official and social efforts by whites to classify Virginia Indians variously as “persons of color,” “mulattoes,” or African Americans. Native peoples’ reservation lands in Virginia disappeared, except for two that survive to this day. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey people of those two reservations had some advantages in that they had and have a land base, and along with that land they also have community structures recognized by whites. Even the reservation peoples, though, faced white reluctance to concede the continuing existence of red, rather than black or white, identities in Virginia. Non-reservation tidewater Native people had even trickier choices to make about when and how they would identify themselves publicly, in official situations and documents, as Indians…

Read the entire dissertation here.