Mixed Race Studies

Japanese Officer Slain

San Francisco Call
Volume 113, Number 107
1913-03-17
page 3, column 4
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Los Angeles Half-caste Policeman Is Murdered in “Little Tokyo”

LOS ANGELES, March 16.—Tom Fushiyama White, a half-caste Japanese, who had been connected with the Los Angeles police force for half a dozen years, was found murdered early today in an alley in “Little Tokyo.” the Japanese quarter of the city. He had been struck on the head with a blackjack and there was a “bullet hole through his head.

The Bone People: A Novel (Hardcover Reissue)

LSU Press
April 2005
464 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807130728

Keri Hulme

• Winner of The Booker Prize
• The Pegasus Prize for Literature
• The New Zealand Book Award for Fiction

Integrating both Māori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Māori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that “to care for anything is to invite disaster.” Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Māori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character’s thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.

Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness,The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

My journey has taken me past constructions of race, past constructions of mixed race, and into an understanding of human difference that does not include race as a meaningful category.

Rainier Spencer, “Race and Mixed Race: A Personal Tour,” in As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity, edited by William S. Penn, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 137.

It may seem out of place for three West Indian children, the offspring of an interracial couple, to be living in a small village at Scotland’s northern tip in 1801. Historians tend to think of an Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain as a phenomenon of the last sixty-plus years, and one localized around major urban centers. At the same time, only recently has the topic of inter-racial unions been addressed in the “new” multicultural Britain. The story of the Hay children in Dornoch, however, was not at all unique at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period. Facing intense discrimination, few jobs opportunities, and virtually no educational options in the colonies, West Indians of color fled to Britain with their white fathers’ assistance. Once arrived, they encountered myriad responses. While some white relatives accepted them into their homes, others sued to cut them off from the family fortune. Equally, even though a number of fictional and political tracts welcomed their arrival, others condemned their presence and lobbied to ban them from landing on British soil. Regardless of these variable experiences, mixed-race migrants traveled to Britain consistently during the period. The Hay children may have turned heads on the roads of Dornoch, but they would not have been a wholly unfamiliar sight.

Daniel Alan Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2010).

…I don’t believe multi-racial makes sense by my understanding of race.  Race is socially constructed and “multi-racial” seems to assume that race is biological: if parents are of different then the kid is “mixed”.   But that is not how race works. Race is constructed through law, history, culture, practice, custom, etc.

“Black” does not designate having two parents who are both “un-mixed” descendants of Africa and African diaspora. “Black” [is] derived from society.  There is no “mixed race” history, institutions, cultural practices.  There are mixed race [people] who are part of all these, but no group history.  I believe all people can self-identify themselves in ways that feel comfortable and honest, but the social/political part is bigger. I have a white mother and black father, but this doesn’t make me mixed race.  Race is not biology. In USA this combo makes me black.

My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP)…

Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Eddings, Jeff, “Princeton Professor tweets about her views on mixed-race identity,” Mixed Child: The Pulse of the Mixed Community, (July 27, 2009). http://www.mixedchild.com/NEWS/August2009/Princeton_Professor.htm or http://coleridgehead.blogspot.com/2009/07/melissa-harris-lacewell-on-race.html.

Woman of mixed racial heritage have historically been described as exotic, a term with simultaneously positive and negative connotations. Despite its  various meanings, it always had a sexual connotation to it. On one hand it was a coded term for objectifying and fantasizing what such woman sexually offered that might be different from other women.  On the other hand, it was term that suggested that such a woman was physically attractive in a way that set her apart from other women. This latter issue has made women, more than men of mixed race, the subject of suspicion and jealousy in heterosexually driven relationships in communities of color, because a woman’s social worth has historically been attached to her physical appearance.

Maria P. P. Root, “From Exotic to Dime a Dozen,” In Biracial Women In Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race, edited by Angela R. Gillem, Ph.D., Cathy A. Thompson, Ph.D., (New York, London, Oxford: The Hawford Press, 2004), 20.

The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White

University of Iowa Press
April 2013
144 pages
5 ¾ x 9 ¼
Paper ISBN: 1-60938-160-2; 978-1-60938-160-8

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents, examines the experience of her mixed-race identity. Embracing the far-ranging stimuli of her media-obsessed upbringing, she grasps at news clippings, visual fragments, and lyrics from past and present in order to weave together a world of sense.

Art in all forms guides the author toward understanding concepts like blackness, jazz, mortality, riots, space, time, self, and other without falling prey to the myth that all things must exist within a system of binaries. Recalling her awkward attempts at coolness during her childhood, Sabatini Sloan evokes Thelonious Monk’s stage persona as a metaphor for blackness. Through the conceptual art of Adrian Piper, the author is able to understand what is so quietly menacing about the sharp, clean lines of an art gallery where she works as an assistant. The result is a compelling meditation on identity and representation.

Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

University of Michigan Press
2013
232 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-472-11861-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02890-0

Andreá N. Williams, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Photograph of John and Lugenia Burns Hope and family, undated, Atlanta University Photographs—Individuals, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library (Pictured from left to right: Dr. John Hope, Edward Hope, John Hope, II, and and Lugenia Burns Hope)

New insights on the intersection of race and class in black fiction from the 1880s to 1900s

Dividing Lines is one of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature. Clear and engaging, this book unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities.

By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled popular notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. But even as the writers highlighted middle-class achievement, they worried over whether class distinctions would help or sabotage collective black protest against racial prejudice. Andreá N. Williams argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction’s form. In these telling moments, authors innovatively dared to address the sensitive topic of class differences—a topic inextricably related to American civil rights and social opportunity.

Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

Contents

• Introduction: Contending Classes, Dividing Lines
• 1. The Language of Class: Taxonomy and Respectability in Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy
• 2. Working through Class: The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs’s Overshadowed
• 3. Mapping Class Difference: Space and Social Mobility in Paul L. Dunbar’s Short Fiction
• 4. Blood and the Mark of Class: Pauline Hopkins’s Genealogies of Status
• 5. Classing the Color Line: Class-Passing, Antiracism, and Charles W. Chesnutt
• Epilogue: Beyond the Talented Tenth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

LSU Press
January 2013
336 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
13 halftones, 2 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807150146

Emily Epstein Landau
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park

From 1897 to 1917 the red-light district of Storyville commercialized and even thrived on New Orleans’s longstanding reputation for sin and sexual excess. This notorious neighborhood, located just outside of the French Quarter, hosted a diverse cast of characters who reflected the cultural milieu and complex social structure of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, a city infamous for both prostitution and interracial intimacy. In particular, Lulu White—a mixed-race prostitute and madam—created an image of herself and marketed it profitably to sell sex with light-skinned women to white men of means. In Spectacular Wickedness, Emily Epstein Landau examines the social history of this famed district within the cultural context of developing racial, sexual, and gender ideologies and practices.

Storyville’s founding was envisioned as a reform measure, an effort by the city’s business elite to curb and contain prostitution—namely, to segregate it. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which, when challenged by New Orleans’s Creoles of color, led to the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, constitutionally sanctioning the enactment of “separate but equal” laws. The concurrent partitioning of both prostitutes and blacks worked only to reinforce Storyville’s libidinous license and turned sex across the color line into a more lucrative commodity.

By looking at prostitution through the lens of patriarchy and demonstrating how gendered racial ideologies proved crucial to the remaking of southern society in the aftermath of the Civil War, Landau reveals how Storyville’s salacious and eccentric subculture played a significant role in the way New Orleans constructed itself during the New South era.

He [John C. Minkins] said the Negro need have no objection to absolutely prohibitive laws against miscegenation, as they would give him a far wider range of matrimonial choice than any other race on earth, since he could have all the thirty-second degree Negroes and more than 1,100,000 others, ranging from half white to thirty-one thirty-seconds white, from which to choose, adding, “The range is wide enough and attractive enough to satisfy the most adventurous and exacting among us.” He was not disposed to be disturbed by legitimate miscegenation and its ultimate effects, as they would take care of themselves as they had done ever since the present European Caucasian races sprang from the Negro’s ancestors, the Euro-Africans.

“John C. Minkins on Race Purity,” The Indianapolis Recorder: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted the to Best Interest of the Negroes (May 7, 1910), page 1, columns 4-5. http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/IRecorder/id/18654/rec/1.