Mixed Race Studies

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914

Berghahn Books
July 2013
262 pages
25 ills, 2 maps, bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-953-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-954-1

Edited by:

Mischa Honeck, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Martin Klimke, Associate Professor of History
New York University, Abu Dhabi

Anne Kuhlmann, Research Fellow in Russian History
Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, Berlin

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans’ perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany’s protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

Contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann
• PART I: SAINTS AND SLAVES, MOORS AND HESSIANS
  • Chapter 1. The Calenberg Altarpiece: Black African Christians in Renaissance Germany / Paul Kaplan
  • Chapter 2. Black Masques: Notions of Blackness in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries / Kate Lowe
  • Chapter 3. Ambiguous Duty: Black Servants at German Ancien Régime Courts / Anne Kuhlmann
  • Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Africans in German Court divertissements / Rashid-S. Pegah
  • Chapter 5. From American Slaves to Hessian Subjects: Silenced Black Narratives of the American Revolution / Maria Diedrich
• PART II: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO EMPIRE
  • Chapter 6. The German Reception of African American Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century / Heike Paul
  • Chapter 7. “On the Brain of the Negro”: Race, Abolitionism, and Friedrich Tiedemann’s Scientific Discourse on the African Diaspora / Jeannette Eileen Jones
  • Chapter 8. Liberating Sojourns? African American Travelers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany / Mischa Honeck
  • Chapter 9. Global Proletarians, Uncle Toms and Native Savages: The Antinomies of Black Identity in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Bradley Naranch
  • Chapter 10. We Shall Make Farmers of Them Yet: Tuskegee’s Uplift Ideology in German Togoland / Kendahl Radcliffe
  • Chapter 11. Education and Migration: Cameroonian School Children and Apprentices in the German Metropole, 1884-1914 / Robbie Aitken
• Afterword: Africans in Europe: New Perspectives / Dirk Hoerder
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

In Florida, a Death Foretold

The New York Times
2012-03-31

Isabel Wilkerson

In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, “The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’,” (interview with Jenée Desmond-Harris), The Root, June 6, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/views/browner-america-marcia-dawkins-qa.

The first black president has made it harder to talk about race in America

The Washington Post
2012-03-23

Reniqua Allen, Freelance Journalist and Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside a posh bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my friends of almost two decades. I made an offhanded comment about the ratio of blonde-haired-blue-eyed chicks to brown girls like me. It seemed like a zillion to one.

My pals, who are white, didn’t get why I was bringing this up. “No one cares about race except you,” one said.

I tried to explain my frustration with having to always choose between an all-black experience or being the “only one,” whether at work, in grad school or even out for a night in New York. I waited for a nod of sympathy; instead, my best friend threw her hands up and said: “How can we all be racist? Look at who is president!”

I didn’t have a response.

Right now the nation has embarked on a massive conversation about race surrounding the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. On Friday, President Obama weighed in. “I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out: How does something like this happen?” he said.

It’s an important conversation to have — but I fear it won’t lead anywhere…

Read the entire article here.

He Checked That Box, But How Black is Obama?

Politic365: From Your Point of View
2013-07-12

William Reed, Head
The Business Exchange Network

“If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose, my brother?”

– Curtis Mayfield, 1969

In the official U.S. 2010 head count, President Barack Obama provided one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African American. Since the option was introduced in 2000, the census figures indicate that the country has 5.2 million multiracial individuals. Americans who check more than one box for race now make up 5 percent of the minority population. It’s of note that Obama didn’t check multiple boxes that were available on the form, or choose the option that allowed him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He simply ticked the box that said “Black, African American, or Negro.”

Though he checked the census “Black” box, is Obama “Black” like you and me? To date, he has paid no attention to Blacks and their economic challenges. African-American voters are rooted in the belief that Obama’s platform and persona represent “real Black Americans.” They both may have run the streets of Chicago; however, it’s doubtful Obama knows about the late Curtis Mayfield and what he represented. An American singer, songwriter and record producer best known for his anthem-like music, Mayfield recorded and produced “message music” during the 1960s and 1970s. “Choice of Colors” hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s R&B chart and reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Neither did Obama grow up under the influence of a weekly Jet and or Ebony magazine adorning the family living room coffee table. As opaque as Obama is to Blacks, a fellow Chicago businessman, the late John H. Johnson, made his fortune catering to us.

Obama has yet to show up in the East Room in a dashiki, but his being “Black” and being “there” has spawned “Obamania” among African Americans. Black voters love the fact that Obama checked the “Black” box, even though his mother was a white woman from Kansas. His father was a Black Kenyan. Obama’s biracial identity helped him build a sizable middle-class American following; it’s also opened up questions as to his authenticity as a Black man. “Obama and the Biracial Factor,” edited by Andrew J. Jolivette, is a book that explores the role of Obama’s mixed-race identity in his path to the presidency. It offers a broad and penetrating view of the importance of race in the ongoing development of American politics. It demonstrates how mixed-race identity reinforces rather than challenges white supremacy within popular discourse…

Read the entire article here.

This study adds to the growing body of literature on multiracial identity by illustrating the importance of reflected appraisals in shaping racial identity. Importantly, these findings also show how reflected appraisals are fundamentally shaped by the one-drop rule (for black-white Americans in particular). Few studies examine reflected appraisals as a determinant of racial identity (Khanna 2004), and I find that biracial respondents frequently explain their black identities as due, in part, to how they believe they are viewed by “others” and by “larger society.” As suggested by Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001), however, who argue that how biracial people think others view them is moderated by social context, many respondents draw distinctions between how they believe they are perceived depending upon whether the observers are white or black. Other white people, they argue, see them as black, while other black people are more likely to recognize their multiracial backgrounds. These conflicting perceptions have the potential to shape different “racial reflections” (e.g., as black or multiracial), yet I find that the one-drop rule affects the entire reflected appraisal process, subsequently shaping “internalized” black identities for the majority of respondents.

Nikki Khanna, “‘If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule,” Sociological Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 1 (Winter 2010). 113-114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01162.x.