Mixed Race Studies

Clearly Invisible, by Marcia Alesan Dawkins

The Christian Century: Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully.
2013-01-23

Rachel Stone

The one time I visited my maternal grandfather’s house, we had planned to stay four days. I was ten and had seen my grandfather just once before in my life. I don’t recall if he ever spoke to me, but my mother and I are fairly certain that he never called me by my name. That was probably a matter of principle for him—Rachel being a Hebrew name and he being an active anti-Semite.

In the spaces around his desk where family photos might have hung were portraits of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. When I put my summer shorts and T-shirts in the creaky oak dresser of the guest room, there was a red, white and black swastika armband in the drawer. We stayed for the night but left the next morning. I never saw him again.

As strange as that story is, the stranger part is this: my grandfather was Jewish, a fact that seems to have been unknown or ignored by the white supremacist groups to which he belonged. He was a Jew passing as a white Christian separatist.

But what about me? My mother became a Christian in her teens after a thoroughly secular upbringing, and my dad was raised Catholic and is now a Baptist pastor. I’m told I don’t look Jewish, or at least that I don’t have a “Jewish nose.” So am I Jewish? Am I passing? Does it matter?

In Clearly Invisible, Marcia Alesan Dawkins explores passing—presenting oneself as a member of a racial group to which one does not belong. Dawkins argues that passing is a rhetorical act that “forces us to think and rethink what, exactly, makes a person black, white or ‘other,’ and why we care.” She articulates a critical vocabulary of 13 “passwords” that can help us understand passing as “a form of rhetoric that is racially sincere, compatible with reasoned deliberative discourse, and expresses what fits rightly when people do not fit rightly with the world around them.”…

Read the entire review here.

The liberation of Barack Obama

The Washington Post
2013-01-20

E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer

Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history. His task is not to manufacture a legacy but to leave his successors a nation that is more tranquil because it finally resolved arguments that roiled it for decades.

Whatever happens in the next four years, Obama will forever be our first African American president, and our first biracial president. He has won two successive popular-vote majorities. Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of them icons, are the only other Democrats who managed this.

Obama fought for and signed a sweeping health-care law, an accomplishment matched only by Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare. He led the country out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Restoring growth will count for more on the historical scales than petty arguments over what his stimulus program achieved. He ended one unpopular war and is preparing to close another…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Michael Jeffries on the Cultural Significance of President Obama

Wellesley College News
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
2013-01-18

New Book by Wellesley American Studies Professor Tackles Race in America

Michael Jeffries, Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of American Studies, studies race, gender, politics, identity, and popular culture. His new book, Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America, looks at how race relies on other social forces, like gender and class, for its meaning and impact.

The book features discussions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman; we asked him about some of those themes.

Your book focuses on “an understanding of how race works in America” rather than emphasizing the details of President Obama’s political career; why is it important for the reader to think about the topic this way?

We need to move away from “great man” or “great woman” explanations for historical change. President Obama is a supremely talented politician, and an important thinker and speaker in many ways, but he operates within all sorts of constraints. Likewise, our impressions of the president are constrained by our cultural context—the language we use, the images we see, and the stories that are amplified by media outlets become the raw material for building our own personal models of Barack Obama. The way we talk and think about race is obviously a major factor in all this, but race is such a contentious and taboo topic that racial discussion is fraught with missteps and misunderstandings. The only way to get a grip on Obama-mania and effectively counteract racism is to force ourselves to think about race in concert with other ideas, like class and gender…

Read the entire interview here.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America

Stanford University Press
2013
224 pages
2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780804780957
Paper ISBN: 9780804780964
E-book ISBN: 9780804785570

Michael P. Jeffries, Sidney R. Knafel Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Barack Obama’s election as the first black president in American history forced a reconsideration of racial reality and possibility. It also incited an outpouring of discussion and analysis of Obama’s personal and political exploits. Paint the White House Black fills a significant void in Obama-themed debate, shifting the emphasis from the details of Obama’s political career to an understanding of how race works in America. In this groundbreaking book, race, rather than Obama, is the central focus.

Michael P. Jeffries approaches Obama’s election and administration as common cultural ground for thinking about race. He uncovers contemporary stereotypes and anxieties by examining historically rooted conceptions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman. In so doing, Jeffries casts new light on how we think about race and enables us to see how race, in turn, operates within our daily lives.

Race is a difficult concept to grasp, with outbursts and silences that disguise its relationships with a host of other phenomena. Using Barack Obama as its point of departure, Paint the White House Black boldly aims to understand race by tracing the web of interactions that bind it to other social and historical forces.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: THROUGH THE FOG
• CHAPTER 2: MY (FOUNDING) FATHER’S SON: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Inheritance
• CHAPTER 3: “MUTTS LIKE Me”: Barack Obama, Tragic Mulattos, and Cool Mixed-Race Millennial
• CHAPTER 4: POSTRACIALISM RECONSIDERED: Class, the Black Counterpublic, and the End of Black Politics
• CHAPTER 5: THE PERILS OF BEING SUPERWOMAN: Michelle Obama’s Public Image
• CHAPTER 6: A PLACE CALLED “OBAMA”
• Appendix I. A Discussion of Racial Inequality
• Appendix II. Interviewing Multiracial Students
• Notes
• Index