Mixed Race Studies

The Myth of Race

Argo-Navis
2012-11-27
154 pages
8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 0786754362; ISBN-13: 978-0786754366

Jefferson M. Fish, Professor Emeritus of Psychology
St. John’s University, New York City

The Myth of Race deals concisely with a wide range of topics, from how the concept of race differs in different cultures and race relations in the United States, to IQ tests and the census. It draws on scientific knowledge to topple a series of myths that pass as facts, correct false assumptions, and clarify cultural misunderstandings about the highly charged topic of race. The book demonstrates that the apparently straightforward concept of race is actually a confused mixture of two different concepts; and the confusion often leads to miscommunication. The first concept, biological race, simply doesn’t exist in the human species. Instead, what exists is gradual variation in what people look like (e.g., skin color and facial features) and in their genes, as you travel around the planet—with more distant populations appearing more different than closer ones. If you travel in different directions, the populations look different in different ways. The second concept, social race, is a set of cultural categories for labeling people based on how their ancestors were classified, selected aspects of what they look like, or various combinations of both. These sets of categories vary widely from one culture to another.

The book draws on scientific knowledge to topple a series of myths that pass as facts, correct false assumptions, and clarify cultural misunderstandings about the highly charged topic of race.

Here are some of those myths:

• The myth that humans are divided into Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid races
• The myth that people cannot change their race
• The myth of the tragic mulatto
• The myth of biologically based differences in intelligence among the races

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Myth of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid Races
• 2. The Myth that a Persons Race Cannot Change
• 3. Racial Myths and Cultural Misunderstandings
• 4. Racial Myths in the Census
• 5. Racial Myths and the Authors Family
• 6. Myths about Race and Intelligence
• 7. Dreams from My Daughter: Mixed Race Myths
• 8. How the Myth of Race Took Hold

Intermarriage and Multicultural Families

My Jewish Learning
2012-12-13

Ruth Abusch-Magder, Rabbi-in-Residence
Be’chol Lashon, San Francisco, California

Like it or not, intermarriage is a fact in Jewish life.

And for the most part the Jewish community has learned to live with it. Sure, different movements deal with it differently. Sure, some congregations are more adept and accommodating. But from Renewal to Orthodox we no longer assume that a Jew by birth will marry another Jew by birth.
 
But as demographics shift in the United States, the nature of intermarriage is changing too. And the Jewish community will need to adapt if it hopes to continue to create spaces for these new Jewish families.
 
In particular, my concern is with multiracial and multicultural families. There is nothing new about Jews from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. There were Jews in Ethiopia centuries before there were Jews in Poland and Jews in India before there were Jews in Spain. Jewish institutional life in the United States, however, has largely been built on the presumption that Jews are white. And our welcome to interfaith couples has similarly assumed that intermarriages between one white Jew and one white non-Jew…

Read the entire article here.

The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (review)

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, Fall 2012
pages 206-208
DOI: 10.1353/sho.2012.0123

Andrea Levine
George Washington University

This volume’s title signals its central critical intervention, a challenge to the masculine biases that have shaped studies of minstrelsy and of cross-racial appropriation and desire more broadly. Most conspicuously, Lori Harrison-Kahan takes on the influential paradigm established by Michael Rogin in his 1996 Blackface, White Noise. Rogin, of course, argues that early twentieth-century Jewish blackface performances worked to confirm the still-contested “whiteness” of Jewish entertainers, a “true” whiteness that presumably resided beneath the “mask” of blackface.

Harrison-Kahan, in fact, identifies Rogin’s paradigm as one of two predominant, “oppositional,” modes of reading Jewish investment in black culture; in the second paradigm, which she traces back at least to Irving Howe, Jews “empathetically identify” with black suffering (p. 4). In practice, though, she contends much more consistently with Rogin’s well-known charges of appropriation and exploitation.

The White Negress demonstrates that once we begin to look at women’s engagement with “cross-cultural exchange” (p. 15), these transactions appear far more nuanced than such binary approaches allow. Harrison-Kahan reads a number of early twentieth-century Jewish American women’s texts and performances as invested less in claiming “whiteness” than in destabilizing it, in part through assertions—if frequently ambivalent ones—of Jewish identity. Her analysis places considerable weight on the resistance to sanctioned gender and sexual roles on the part of such Jewish American female performers and writers as Sophie Tucker and Fannie Hurst. The author also revises “unidirectional” narratives of Jewish American cultural appropriations of “blackness,” suggesting that scholars should acknowledge the more “reciprocal” transactions that obtain among African American and Jewish American cultural producers and historical actors. So, for instance, she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, as a send-up, rather than a reinscription, of minstrel conventions, one that explores both the power dynamics and the mutual “cross-identifications” that attended Black-Jewish coalitions in the early years of the civil rights movement.

In another acute challenge to prevailing scholarship, Harrison-Kahan argues that the racial politics of Edna Ferber’s Showboat look quite different when one reads the novel that served as the basis for the Broadway musical, much-maligned for its traffic in sentimental and demeaning representations of African American characters. Harrison-Kahan emphasizes the novel’s “pluralistic” rendering of Jewishness and its emphasis on racial “mixing.” Similarly, she re-reads Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, which provided the basis for both the 1934 and 1959 film versions, texts far more familiar to most scholars than Hurst’s original novel. Harrison-Kahan argues that Hurst’s novel interrogates and exposes the commodification of “blackness” on which its protagonist’s business rests—and that these challenges to racial stereotypes work in conjunction with the challenges that Bea Pullman, as a “working woman,” poses to normative scripts of white femininity and maternity. As in the chapter on Ferber, the author makes a persuasive case for the under-examination of Hurst as a Jewish American author, in part because her biography deviated from that of the largely New York-based Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose work dominates the Jewish American “canon,” and in part—as with so many women writers—because her work was consistently marginalized by critics for its commercial success. One might, however, suggest that even given the historical frame of Harrison-Kahan’s project, her own privileging of “working” white femininity as a disruptive version of femininity is rather a circumscribed choice, leaving heterosexuality, among other indices of normative femininity, largely intact.

Harrison-Kahan’s readings are subtle and deft, and to her credit, she does not over-state the radicalism of either her own approach or the texts she reconsiders. A characteristic passage reads, “Hurst’s novel thus negotiates a fine line between being an additional inculcation of the mammy myth and a commentary on it” (p. 124). Harrison-Kahan works cogently and intelligently in the ambivalent space she charts, writing in the conclusion that whiteness can be “produced and destabilized through cross-racial performances and encounters” (p. 179).

This volume makes an important contribution to a scholarly…

From Slavery to Wealth: The Life of Scott Bond

University of Arkansas Press
February 2008 (Originally Published: 1917)
336 pages
6 x 9; 72 photographs and index
ISBN 13: 978-0-9768007-6-7 ISBN 10: 0-9768007-6-4

Dan. A. (Daniel Arthur) Rudd (1854-1933)

Theo. (Theophilus) Bond

Edited with a new Preface and Introduction by

Willard B. Gatewood, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

In an era in which African Americans were oppressed and deprived of many of the rights and privileges of citizenship, Scott Bond rose from being born a slave in Madison County, Mississippi, in the early 1850s to wealth and status as a farmer, merchant, and business entrepreneur in Madison, Arkansas, by the early 1900s. From Slavery to Wealth is the story of an extraordinary individual widely known and respected at the time of its first publication in 1917, for his integrity, prodigious energy, and strong work ethic. Throughout his career he never wearied of imploring African Americans to seize the opportunities offered them in the South in general and in the Arkansas Delta in particular. Scott Bond enjoyed an enviable reputation among blacks as well as whites. This reputation ultimately extended far beyond his local community to prominent blacks throughout the South and elsewhere, especially after he gained wider exposure as a conspicuous figure in the National Negro Business League in the early years of the twentieth century.

With this 2008 reprint edition, the current generation can be inspired by the man who has been referred to as the black John D. Rockefeller of Arkansas.

Read the entire book (From Slavery to Wealth. The Life of Scott Bond. The Rewards of Honesty, Industry, Economy and Perseverance) via “Documenting the American South” here.

Scott Bond was born in the early 1850s to an enslaved mother named Ann who worked in the Maben-Bond household near Canton, Mississippi. His father was the nephew of a white slave-owner to whom Bond’s mother had temporarily been hired out as a domestic servant. Just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Bond and his mother were moved to Arkansas, along with his step-father, William Bond, and the rest of the Maben-Bond family’s slaves. After Emancipation, Bond lived with his step-father until age twenty-two, when he “undertook to vouch for himself” and began work on his lifelong goal of becoming a successful businessman (p. 37). Bond accomplished this goal. At the time of his death he owned and farmed 12,000 acres, while also raising livestock and operating a large mercantile store, at least five cotton gins, a gravel pit, a lumber yard, and a saw mill. A member of the National Negro Business League, Bond supported the efforts of Booker T. Washington, whose philosophies regarding the social advancement of African Americans through economic and agricultural success mirrored Bond’s own. In 1877, he married Magnolia Nash, with whom he had eleven sons. Bond was killed in March 1933 by one of his registered bulls. According to his son, Ulysses, he “went down swinging and died among the things he loved” (p. 152)…

Read the entire summary here.