Mixed Race Studies

Henry Samuel, Frankfort Barber and Free Man of Color

Random Thoughts on History: My musings on American, African American, Southern, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Public History topics and books
2013-03-19

Tim Talbott
Frankfort, Kentucky

Recently reading Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom got me to wondering if Frankfort had any black barbers in the antebellum era. Well, I didn’t have to look too hard to find one. No, I didn’t have to search through slides of microfilm searching the 1860 census records for Franklin County barbers—after all, in this particular case that would not have helped me.

Fortunately, I had remembered seeing an advertisement for a town barber while browsing through issues of the Frankfort Commonwealth newspaper some time back. And, it was not difficult to find these particular advertisements when I went back searching, because Henry Samuel had an ad in almost every edition of the newspaper for many years in the 1850s and 1860s. He must have been a firm believer in the old adage that “advertising pays.” However, there was no clue from the advertisements whether he was African American or white. That part took some searching…

Read the entire article here.

Displaced looks: The lived experience of beauty and racism

Feminist Theory
Volume 14, Number 2, August 2013  
pages 137-151
DOI: 10.1177/1464700113483241

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

 With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on.

Read or purchase the article here.

Participatory diagramming in social work research: Utilizing visual timelines to interpret the complexities of the lived multiracial experience

Qualitative Social Work
Volume 12, Number 4 (July 2013)
pages 414-432
DOI: 10.1177/1473325011435258

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

The purpose of this article is to present an illustrative example of the analytic potential of image-based research in social work. Insight gained from a qualitative research study that used a novel form of participatory diagramming to examine the racial identity development of ten multiracial individuals is referenced and critiqued. Utilizing a critical visual methodological framework to analyze visual timelines, this article offers insight into the contextually rich and dynamic processes comprising the multiracial experience. This article concludes with an informative discussion of how visual methods support key social work values, including commitment to clients and understanding the person-in-environment, and how participatory diagramming in particular can enhance culturally sensitive and responsible research and practice with multiracial individuals.

Read or purchase the article here.

Missing faces

The Guardian
2007-03-23

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

As the United Kingdom marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade tomorrow, Jackie Kay challenges fellow Scots to acknowledge their forebears’ part in this shameful history and reflects on the ordeal suffered by her ancestors

We’re perhaps over-fond of dates, of going round in circles of a hundred years to mark the birth of, or the death of, trying to grasp, as we all get older, what time means. Anniversaries give us the perfect excuse to try and catch up on what we already should have caught up on. Anniversaries afford us a big noisy opportunity to try and remember what we should not have forgotten.

Slavery is one of those subjects we all think we know about. Men were shipped, packed like sardines, as in that famous drawing by Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist. The Africans sold their own people – this gets mentioned so often, as if the reiteration of African complicity diminishes responsibility. But what spirit, eh, the African people? Mind you, there’s always been slavery, the ancient Romans were at it, etc etc. We are closed to any more detail; we don’t want to know. We don’t want to imagine how slavery would affect each of the five senses. Too much information fills ordinary people, black and white, with revulsion, distaste, or worse, induces boredom. We think we’ve heard it all before…

Read the entire article here.