Mixed Race Studies

Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose

SCA Close Up: News and Events From the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts, New York, New York
2013-08-29

An eclectic heritage, a penchant for hip-hop, and life as an artist in New York City set Tim Okamura (MFA 1993 Illustration as Visual Essay) on a path toward social consciousness. Collected by celebrity clients (including Uma Thurman, Questlove and John Mellencamp) and exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London, his portraits are meant to “contribute a positive voice to the conversations going on today.” Okamura’s paintings in “The Pond, the Mirror, the Kaleidoscope” depict a trio of female boxers, suggesting women’s plight for equality and justice.

SCA: You’re known for your paintings of African American women.  You’re half-Japanese, half-Caucasian and you grew up in Canada. Many of your paintings celebrate the New York street scene. How did this juxtaposition come about?

Tim Okamura: It’s a question that comes up often—and it’s really not a short answer for me—and it’s very intriguing to me that there are people who tend to find the juxtaposition of the work, and who I am, quite “conceptual.” It’s something I hadn’t fully considered when I began making the work. The idea that there would be an intertwining assessment of both model and artist when looking at the work was vaguely in the back of my mind, but it never influenced my choices. As someone who has focused primarily on portraiture up to this point in my career, I think the biggest factor in choosing my subjects has always just been a deep interest in the “stories” of the people I paint. I consider portraiture a form of story-telling as it relates to the subject, and I really wanted to discover or reveal to my audience stories that I felt were compelling, and perhaps had not been told previously…

…I think there is an additional layer of psychological interest for me in that my vision is filtered through the lens of my personal experience as someone of mixed race growing up in Canada. I was often identified as being “different” and even persecuted for this perception. As a result, I tended to form friendships with minority kids and anyone who might have felt excluded from the “mainstream.” This has had a significant impact on my view of the world, my desire for social justice and equality, and my long-standing motivations as an artist who is interested primarily in people…

Read the entire interview here.

The story behind Dido Belle – the bi-racial Londoner who helped end slavery in Britain

London Evening Standard
2014-01-08

Susannah Butter

Susannah Butter tells the tale of Dido Belle, ahead of the release of a film about her extraordinary life starring Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

Among the many aristocratic faces gazing out of frames in Hampstead’s newly refurbished Kenwood House, there’s one that sticks out. Standing next to Elizabeth Murray in a print of Johann Zoffany’s portrait from c.1799, there is a smiling girl wearing pearls. But although she looks equal to her playmate, she is black. This girl is Dido Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman. Belle was brought up at Kenwood, a house partially built with “blood money” from the Triangular Trade, and she made her own contribution to the abolition of slavery. A film of her extraordinary life, Belle, is out this spring with a cast including Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

It comes after two films examining the black historical experience: British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and Lee Daniels’s The Butler, both set in the United States. But there is another story of slavery that needs telling and it’s set in London…

…Belle was born the illegitimate daughter of Admiral Sir John Lindsay of the Royal Navy and Maria Belle, a slave who he met en route from England to Jamaica around 1761. When Lindsay went back to the navy, he entrusted five-year-old Belle to his uncle, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who lived at Kenwood. Lord and Lady Mansfield had no children of their own but raised Belle with Lady Elizabeth Murray, the daughter of Mansfield’s other nephew, David Murray.

“The idea that there was this girl who was part of our cultural legacy in England — a mixed race woman in the 1780s — hooked me,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the London actress who plays Belle. “Speaking as a mixed-race woman in 2013, there aren’t many historical stories about people like me. When people think of ‘dual heritage,’ they think it’s a modern concept but it’s not. I wanted to do justice to Dido.”…

Read the entire article here.

Home is Where the Hurt Is: Racial Socialization, Stigma, and Well-Being in Afro-Brazilian Families

Duke University
2012
228 pages

Elizabeth Hordge Freeman

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation examines racial socialization in Afro-Brazilian families in order to understand how phenotypically diverse families negotiate racial hierarchies and ideologies of white supremacy. As an inductive, qualitative project, this research is based on over fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in fifteen poor and working-class Bahian families and 116 semi-structured interviews with family members and informants. Findings suggest that one of the most prominent features of racial socialization is the pervasive devaluation of black/African influences, which is conveyed through implicit and explicit messages as well as concrete practices (including rituals) that promote the stigmatization of negatively valued racialized physical features. The study reveals a pattern of unequal distribution of affection based on racial appearance (phenotype), which is evident in parent-child, sibling, extended family, and romantic relationships. Findings suggest that negative appraisals of racial phenotype may significantly compromise affective bonds in families and have social psychological consequences impacting self-esteem and sense of belonging, while also eliciting suicidal ideations and anxieties. These outcomes are most pronounced for Afro-Brazilian females. Racial socialization also conveys the “strategically ambiguous” logic of color and racial classification, uncritically exposes family members to racist messages, jokes, and stereotypical images of Afro-Brazilians, and encourages cultural participation that superficially valorizes Afro-Brazilian culture and fosters nationalism, rather than racial identity. In contrast to traditional findings of racial socialization in the U.S., messages valorizing racial heritage are rare and efforts to prepare family members for bias rely on universal terms. Families do employ counter-discourses and creative strategies of resistance; and so, racial socialization is characterized by practices that reflect both resistance and accommodation to racial hierarchies. I conclude that racial socialization in families is influenced by and sustains racialization processes that maintain the broader system of white supremacy. Contrary to how racial socialization has been framed as having a purely protective role in families, this study illustrates how it may disadvantage blacks vis-à-vis whites and uniquely stigmatizes the most “black-looking” family members vis-à-vis those who more closely approximate an idealized (whiter) somatic norm. Future studies should triangulate data on racial socialization from other regions of the Americas.

Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 “The Face of A Slave”
  • 1.2 Background
  • 1.3 Case Selection
    • 1.3.1 Community Site
  • 1.4 Data and Methods
  • 1.5 Methodology
  • 1.6 “Second Sight” or Double Vision? My Subjectivity in the Field
  • 1.7 Organization of the Dissertation
• 2. Literature Review
  • 2.1 Crafting a Social Order: Race and Racialization
    • 2.1.1 Towards a Phenotypic Continuum
  • 2.2 Blinded by the White: Whitening and Racial Socialization in Families
    • 2.2.1 Studying Families in the U.S. and Brazil
    • 2.2.2 Mothering in Families
  • 2.3 The Stigmatized Body and Well Being
  • 2.4 The Family Systems Paradigm and Emotions
  • 2.5 Conceptual Framework
  • 2.6 Theoretical Framework
  • 2.7 The Racial Rubik: Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
• 3. “All in the Family”: Implicit and Explicit Racial Socialization
  • 3.1 Chapter Preface
  • 3.2 “Strategic Ambiguity” and Color Inconsistencies
    • 3.2.1 Family Interventions in Racial Classification
    • 3.2.2 Will the real white person please stand up?
    • 3.2.3 There are no whites, We are all black!
  • 3.3 Race and Space
    • 3.3.1 Todo no seu Lugar – Everything in its Place
  • 3.4 “Explicit Socialization Messages?.
    • 3.4.1 Educação é Salvação: Education is Salvation
    • 3.4.2 Reading Bodies, Not Books
  • 3.5 Racially (Mixed Messages) and Quotas
  • 3.6 What is racism?
  • 3.7 Media and Culture
    • 3.7.1 Novelas
    • 3.7.2 Re-Telling National Tales
  • 3.8 Conclusion
• 4. What’s Love Got to Do With It? : The Stigma of Racialized Features, Affect, and Socialization in Families
  • 4.1 Context
  • 4.2 The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Mother-Child Relationships
  • 4.2.1 Harbingers of Racial Socialization: Babies
  • 4.3 Like a Good Neighbor
  • 4.4 Mama’s Baby is Daddy’s Maybe
  • 4.5 Racial Roulette and Sibling Rivalry
  • 4.6 She’s just my (pheno)Type: Romantic Love
    • 4.6.1 Race and Romance
  • 4.7 Discussion
• 5. Black and “Blue”: Racial Stigma and Well being
  • 5.1 Incog-negro: Abandoning Blackness
  • 5.2 When Racial Roulette is Violent
  • 5.3 Depression, Trust, and Trauma
  • 5.4 Pretty Please?! Beauty and Self-Esteem
  • 5.5 We (Don’t) Belong Together
  • 5.6 Discussion
• 6. Pigments of the Imagination: Beauty, Body, and Racialization
  • 6.1 The Bodies Exhibit
  • 6.2 Hands, Feet, and Ears, Oh My!
  • 6.3 Hair-itage
    • 6.3.1 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
  • 6.4 The Roots of Resistance: Afro-Aesthetics
    • 6.4.1 Hide My Roots! Afro-Aesthetics and Cultural Movements at Home
  • 6.5 Discussion
• 7. “Where There is Power, There is Also Resistance
  • 7.1 Nascimento Family Values
    • 7.1.1 Racial Names.
    • 7.1.2 Race and Privilege
    • 7.1.3 Beauty
    • 7.1.4 Racial History
    • 7.1.5 Internalized Racism
  • 7.2 The Santos Family
    • 7.2.1 Racial Rituals
  • 7.3 The de Jesus Family: The Brazilian Black Panthers
    • 7.3.1 Brief Life History of Pantera Negra
    • 7.3.2 Explicit Socialization
  • 7.4 Discussion
• 8. Conclusion – The Ties That Bind
  • 8.1 Limitations and Future Directions
  • 8.2 Conclusions
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• References
• Bibliography

List of Tables

• Table 1: Color Categorization by Percentage
• Table 2: Summary of the color terms used in interviews and observations
• Table 3: Summary of responses to the question: What is your race?
• Table 4: List of all color or racial nicknames used by informants

Read the entire dissertation here.

The concept of socialrace

Philosophy Social Criticism
Volume 40, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 69-90
DOI: 10.1177/0191453713498252

Michael O. Hardimon
Department of Philosophy
University of California, San Diego

Explication of the concept of socialrace: the concept variously refers to (1) a social group that is taken to be a racialist race, (2) the social position occupied by a particular social group that is a socialrace and (3) the system of social positions that are socialraces. Socialrace is distinguished from other more familiar forms of social construction. The sense in which socialrace counts as a race concept is explained. The advantages of the term ‘socialrace’ are discussed. The desiderata for a conception of socialrace are articulated. The concept socialrace is contrasted with other similar concepts.

Read or purchase the article here.

Jackie Kay on reading out an anti-racist poem at a football ground

The Guardian
2012-10-26

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Jackie Kay readies for an experiment – being a poet on Sheffield United’s pitch and helping to kick racism out of football

On Monday I’m going to be pitching my anti-racist poem to fans of the Blades and Pompey at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane stadium, the oldest major football stadium in the world still hosting matches.

I’m an experiment – a poet on the pitch, but not a pitch-perfect poet. I might even be a botched experiment. As far as I know, I’m the first poet to read to a whole stadium just before kick-off – but certainly the first woman poet. The two women behind this initiative are Sue Beeley, head of community at Sheffield United, and Su Walker from Off the Shelf Literature Festival. They came up with the idea of commissioning a poet to write an anti-racist poem, read it at a match, and paint the poem on the stadium walls. They picked me because they’d read I was sporty! Beeley said: ”If it works, it will go down a storm, if it doesn’t we’ll let you know.” Off the Shelf has commissioned poets for years; slowly, deftly, they’ve been creating a poetic map of the city of steel. In Sheffield, Andrew Motion has a poem on the side of one student building, Jarvis Cocker is on another, Benjamin Zephaniah on the railings of another, and Roger McGough can be found in the Winter Garden…

…When I was researching my poem, I came across Arthur Wharton, the first professional black footballer to play in the Football League. He was born in Ghana; his father was half-Scottish and half-Grenadian. He came to England in 1882 and by 1894 was playing for Sheffield United. He died in 1930. Wharton was my talisman. I imagined him coming back from the dead and hearing the news. I imagined his reaction to the monkey chanting. Just thinking about him made me think about the extra time on racism’s clock; how racism is society’s own goal. Shaming….

Read the entire article here.

The New York Times and NPR Are Still Clueless About Latinos

Alisa Valdes: Official Website for Writer and Producer Alisa Valdes
2014-01-03

Alisa Valdes

More than a decade ago, when I worked as a staff writer for two of the nation’s top newspapers (The Boston Globe and the LA Times), I was often disappointed to see my fellow writers and editors using the words “Hispanic” or “Latino” as physical descriptors. They seemed to believe the US Census category of Hispanic/Latino to denote physical, “racial” characteristics, in spite of race itself being entirely a social construct with no basis in genetic or scientific fact, and in spite of the United States Census Bureau itself stating clearly that “Hispanics may be of any race.”

Put in simpler terms, Latin America is as “racially” or physically diverse as the United States as a whole. There is no single “type” or “race” of human being in Latin America, and as a result Latinos are “racially”/physically as diverse as the United States population as a whole — or as the entirety of humanity…

Read the entire article here.

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

Genealogical Publishing Company
2000
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806350424

Paul Heinegg

As he did for Free Blacks in North Carolina and Virginia, Paul Heinegg has reconstructed the history of the free African American communities of Maryland and Delaware by looking at the history of their families.

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a new work that will intrigue genealogists and historians alike. First and foremost, Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on more than 300 Maryland and Delaware black families (naming nearly 6,000 individuals), with copious documentation from the federal censuses of 1790-1810 and colonial sources consulted at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories. No work that we know of brings together so much information on colonial African Americans except Mr. Heinegg’s earlier volume on Virginia and North Carolina. The author offers documentation proving that most of these free black families descended from mixed-race children who were the progeny of white women and African American men. While some of these families would claim Native American ancestry, Mr. Heinegg offers evidence to show that they were instead the direct descendants of mixed-race children.

Colonial Maryland laws relating to marriages between offspring of African American and white partners carried severe penalties. For example, one 18th-century statute threatened a white mother with seven years of servitude and promised to bind her mixed-race offspring until the age of thirty-one. Mr. Heinegg shows that, despite these harsh laws, several hundred child-bearing relationships in Delaware and Maryland took place over the colonial period as evidenced directly from the public record. Maryland families, in particular, which comprise the preponderance of those studied, also had closer relationships with the surrounding slave population than did their counterparts in Delaware, Virginia, or North Carolina. Mr. Heinegg recounts the circumstances under which a number of these freedmen were able to become landowners. Some Maryland families, however, including a number from Somerset County, chose to migrate to Delaware or Virginia, where the opportunities for land ownership were greater.

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a work that will be sought after for its commentary on social history as for its genealogical content and methodology. No collection of African American history or genealogy can be without it.

Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 (Fifth Edition)

Genealogical Publishing Company
2005
2 volumes; 1355 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806352800

Paul Heinegg

The third edition of Paul Heinegg’s Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia was awarded the American Society of Genealogists’ prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994. This fifth edition is Heinegg’s most ambitious effort yet to reconstruct the history of the free African-American communities of Virginia and the Carolinas by looking at the history of their families.

Published in two volumes, and 300 pages longer than the fourth edition, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 consists of detailed genealogies of 600 free black families that originated in Virginia and migrated to North and/or South Carolina from the colonial period to about 1820. The families under investigation represent nearly all African Americans who were free during the colonial period in Virginia and North Carolina. Like its immediate predecessor, the fifth edition traces the branches of a number of African-American families living in South Carolina, where original source materials for this period are much scarcer than in the two states to its north. Researchers will find the names of the more than 10,000 African Americans encompassed by Mr. Heinegg’s genealogies conveniently located in the full-name index at the back of the second volume.

Mr. Heinegg’s findings are the outgrowth of 20 years of research in some 1,000 manuscript volumes, including colonial and early national period tax records, colonial parish registers, 1790-1810 census records, wills, deeds, Free Negro Registers, marriage bonds, Revolutionary pension files, newspapers, and more. The author furnishes copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

A work of extraordinary breadth and detail, Free African Americans is of great importance to social historians as well as genealogists. The fifth edition traces many families who were covered in previous editions back to their 17th- and 18th-century roots (families like those of humanitarian Ralph Bunch, former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis, and tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, that would go on to fame or fortune). Providing copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, Mr. Heinegg shows that most of these families were the descendants of white servant women who had had children by slaves or free African Americans, not the descendants of slave owners. He dispels a number of other myths about the origins and status of free African Americans, such as the “mysterious” origins of the Lumbees, Melungeons, and other such marginal groups, and demonstrates conclusively that many free African-American families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia were landowners.

The two volumes include the following family surnames: Abel, Acre, Adams, Africa, Ailstock, Alford, Allen, Alman, Alvis, Ampey, Ancel, Anderson, Andrews, Angus, Archer, Armfield, Armstrong, Arnold, Artis, Ashberry, Ashby, Ashe, Ashton, Ashworth, Atkins, Aulden, Avery, Bailey, Baine, Baker, Balkham, Ball, Baltrip, Banks, Bannister, Barber, Bartly/Bartlett, Bass, Bates, Battles, Bazden, Bazmore, Beckett, Bee, Bell, Bennett, Berry, Beverly, Bibbens, Bibby, Biddie, Bing, Bingham, Binns, Bizzell, Black, Blake, Blango, Blanks, Blizzard, Blue, Bolton, Bond, Boon, Booth, Bosman, Bow, Bowden, Bowers, Bowles, Bowman, Bowmer, Bowser, Boyd, Brady, Branch, Brandican, Brandon/Branham, Braveboy, Braxton, Britt, Brogdon, Brooks, Brown, Bruce, Brumejum, Bryan, Bryant, Bugg, Bullard, Bunch, Bunday, Burden, Burke, Burkett, Burnett, Burrell, Busby, Busy, Butler, Byrd, Cane, Cannady, Carter, Cary, Case, Cassidy, Causey, Cauther, Chambers, Chandler, Chapman, Charity, Chavis, Church, Churchwell, Churton, Clark, Cobb, Cockran, Cole, Coleman, Collins, Combess, Combs, Conner, Cook, Cooley, Cooper, Copeland, Copes, Corn, Cornet, Cornish, Cotanch, Cousins, Cox, Coy, Craig, Crane, Cuff, Cuffee, Cumbo, Cunningham, Curle, Curtis, Custalow, Cuttillo, Cypress, Dales, Davenport, Davis, Day, Dean, Deas, Debrix, Demery, Dempsey, Dennis, Dennum, Derosario, Dixon, Dobbins, Dolby, Donathan, Douglass, Dove, Drake, Drew, Driggers, Dring, Driver, Drury, Duncan, Dungee, Dungill, Dunlop, Dunn, Dunstan, Durham, Dutchfield, Eady, Easter, Edgar, Edge, Edwards, Elliott, Ellis, Elmore, Epperson, Epps, Evans, Fagan, Faggott, Farrar, Farthing, Ferrell, Fielding, Fields, Findley, Finnie, Fletcher, Flood, Flora, Flowers, Fortune, Fox, Francis, Francisco, Franklin, Frazier, Freeman, Frost, Fry, Fullam, Fuller, Fuzmore, Gallimore, Gamby, Garden, Gardner, Garner, Garnes, George, Gibson, Gilbert, Gillett, Godett, Goff, Goldman, Gordon, Gowen, Grace, Graham, Grant, Grantum, Graves, Gray, Grayson, Gregory, Grice, Griffin, Grimes, Groom, Groves, Guy, Gwinn, Hackett, Hagins, Hailey, Haithcock, Hall, Hamilton, Hamlin, Hammond, Hanson, Harden, Harmon, Harris, Harrison, Hartless, Harvey, Hatcher, Hatfield/Hatter, Hawkins, Hawley, Haws, Haynes, Hays, Hearn, Heath, Hedgepeth, Hewlett, Hewson, Hickman, Hicks, Hill, Hilliard, Hitchens, Hiter, Hobson, Hodges, Hogg, Hollinger, Holman, Holmes, Holt, Honesty, Hood, Hoomes, Horn, Howard, Howell, Hubbard, Huelin, Hughes, Humbles, Hunt, Hunter, Hurley, Hurst, Ivey, Jackson, Jacobs, James, Jameson, Jarvis, Jasper, Jeffery, Jeffries, Jenkins, Johns, Johnson, Joiner, Jones, Jordan, Jumper, Keemer, Kelly, Kendall, Kent, Kersey, Key/ Kee, Keyton, King, Kinney, Knight, Lamb, Landum, Lang, Lansford, Lantern, Lawrence, Laws, Lawson, Lee, Lephew, Lester, Lett, Leviner, Lewis, Lighty, Ligon, Lively, Liverpool, Locklear, Lockson, Locus/Lucas, Logan, Longo, Lowry, Lugrove, Lynch, Lyons, Lytle, McCarty, McCoy, McDaniel, McIntosh, Maclin, Madden, Mahorney, Manly, Mann, Manning, Manuel, Marshall, Martin, Mason, Matthews, Mayo, Mays, Meade, Mealy, Meekins, Meggs, Melvin, Miles, Miller, Mills, Milton, Mitchell, Mitchum, Mongom, Monoggin, Month, Moore, Mordick, Morgan, Morris, Mosby, Moses, Moss, Mozingo, Muckelroy, Mumford, Munday, Muns, Murray, Murrow, Nash, Neal, Newsom, Newton, Nicholas, Nickens, Norman, Norris, Norton, Norwood, Nutts, Oats, Okey, Oliver, Otter, Overton, Owen, Oxendine, Page, Pagee, Palmer, Parker, Parr, Parrot, Patrick, Patterson, Payne, Peavy, Peacock, Pendarvis, Pendergrass, Perkins, Peters, Pettiford, Phillips, Pickett, Pierce, Pinn, Pittman, Pitts, Plumly, Poe, Pompey, Portions, Portiss, Powell, Powers, Poythress, Press, Price, Prichard, Proctor, Pryor, Pugh, Pursley, Rains, Ralls, Randall, Ranger, Rann, Raper, Ratcliff, Rawlinson, Redcross, Redman, Reed, Reeves, Revell, Reynolds, Rich, Richardson, Rickman, Ridley, Roberts, Robins, Robinson, Rogers, Rollins, Rosario, Ross, Rouse, Rowe, Rowland, Ruff, Ruffin, Russell, Sample, Sampson, Sanderlin, Santee, Saunders, Savoy, Sawyer, Scott, Seldon, Sexton, Shaw, Shepherd, Shoecraft, Shoemaker, Silver, Simmons, Simms, Simon, Simpson, Sisco, Skipper, Slaxton, Smith, Smothers, Sneed, Snelling, Soleleather, Sorrell, Sparrow, Spelman, Spiller, Spriddle, Spruce, Spurlock, Stafford, Stephens, Stewart, Stringer, Sunket, Swan, Sweat, Sweetin, Symons, Taborn, Talbot, Tann, Tate, Taylor, Teague, Teamer, Thomas, Thompson, Timber, Toney, Tootle, Toulson, Toyer, Travis, Turner, Tyler, Tyner, Tyre, Underwood, Valentine, Vaughan, Vena/Venie, Verty, Vickory, Viers, Walden, Walker, Wallace, Warburton, Warrick, Waters, Watkins, Weaver, Webb, Webster,Weeks, Welch, Wells, West, Wharton, Whistler, White, Whitehurst, Wiggins, Wilkins, Wilkinson, Williams, Willis, Wilson, Winborn, Winn, Winters, Wise, Womble, Wood, Wooten, Worrell, Wright, and Young.

Free African Americans ranks as the greatest achievement in black genealogy of this generation! No collection of African-American genealogy or social history is complete without this two-volume work.

Surprises in the Family Tree

The New York Times
2004-01-08

Mitchell Owens

John Archer first appears in Northampton County, Va., in the mid-17th century. He started a family that prospered, fought in the Revolutionary War and built a mansion. Generations later, Archer’s blood trickled down to me. It mingled in my veins with DNA from a gravedigger in 17th-century Württemberg, Germany; from an Appalachian clan with a recessive gene that turns their skins indigo blue; and from a rich young widow in Jamestown, Va., whose fickle heart led to America’s first breach-of-promise suit, in 1623.

I have been researching my past for two decades, since I was in high school, so finding a new ancestor is hardly startling. Learning about John Archer three years ago, however, was startling. He was black, a slave or indentured servant freed around 1677. I am white. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Now I know better, thanks to Paul Heinegg.

A retired oil-refinery engineer in Collegeville, Pa., Mr. Heinegg, who is white, has compiled genealogies of 900 mixed-race families who lived freely in slaveholding states in “Free African Americans of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia” and “Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware.” (The information is posted on a Web site, http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/.).

Mr. Heinegg’s research offers evidence that most free African-American and biracial families resulted not from a master and his slave, like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but from a white woman and an African man: slave, freed slave or indentured servant.

“Most of the workers in colonial America in the 17th and early 18th centuries were indentured servants, white and black,” said Dr. John B. Boles, a professor of history at Rice University in Houston and the editor of “The Blackwell Companion to the American South” (2001). Since there was not a clear distinction between slavery and servitude at the time, he said, “biracial camaraderie” often resulted in children. The idea that blacks were property did not harden until around 1715 with the rise of the tobacco economy, by which time there was a small but growing population of free families of color. Dr. Boles estimated that by 1860 there were 250,000 free black or mixed-race individuals…

…Tracing those communities has not been easy. ”People of color are often not identified as such in early records,” Mr. Heinegg said. ”For example, an individual might appear in deeds and court records and leave a will without ever mentioning his race.” Sometimes a person’s race can be discerned only by studying the tax assessed on nonwhites. If a man paid the tax on his wife but not himself, Mr. Heinegg said, it meant he was white but she was not.

An added challenge is that racial identity can mutate from free black to white in just a few generations. In my Archer ancestors’ case, it was mixed marriages and a cross-country move: my great-great-grandfather Esquire Collins and his wife, Roxalana Archer, are listed as mulatto in an 1800’s Tennessee census but show up as white on a later Arkansas census. ”You crossed over as early as you were able to,” said Antonia Cottrell Martin, a genealogist in New York. Mixed-race families who had difficulty passing sometimes explained dark complexions as coming from an American Indian or Mediterranean ancestry. ”It’s what people in the South used to call Carolina Portuguese,” said Dr. DeMarce, who comes from a mixed-race background…

Read the entire article here.

Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology

Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research
ISSN 2076-8214 (print)
ISSN 2078-1938 (online)
Volume 4, Number 2 (2012)
pages 199-217

Chad Alan Goldberg, Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Who now reads Robert Park? The answer, it turns out, is that many still do, and with good reason. Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944) was one of the leading figures in what has come to be known as the Chicago school of sociology, which played a central and formative role in American sociology as a whole, especially from 1914 to 1933 when he taught at the University of Chicago (Matthews 1977; Raushenbush 1979). Park remains well known among American sociologists today for his pioneering work on urban life, human ecology, race and ethnic relations, migration, and social disorganization, much of which continues to be assigned and read (though not uncritically) in graduate courses in the United States. This essay focuses on Park’s seminal concept of the “marginal man,” originally presented in his 1928 article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” and later elaborated in the 1937 book The Marginal Man by Park’s student Everett Verner Stonequist (1901–1979), who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1930. After examining the origins of the concept in the work of Park and Stonequist, I review the marginal man’s subsequent career in American sociology. This review is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Instead, it aims to highlight several important lines of development: attempts at theoretical revision; application and extension of the concept to new areas of social inquiry, including the study of occupations, gender, and scientific innovation; and a revival of interest in the marginal man concept as it relates to Park’s original interests in race and ethnic relations and migration. Throughout the essay, I emphasize how the reception, interpretation, and application of Park’s concept was shaped by the ambiguities of the concept itself, which suggested the potential for maladjustment and disorganization but also for creativity and innovation, and by the changing social and historical context in which American sociologists worked. In the essay’s conclusion I outline some ways in which Park’s concept remains relevant to present-day concerns, and I propose some directions for future research…

…While Park and his students regarded Jews as the prototype of the marginal man, they did not confine the concept exclusively to Jews. Indeed, it was partly inspired by Park’s interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry and by the similar notion of double-consciousness formulated by the African-American sociologist and social reformer W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). The “American Negro,” Du Bois (1903:3) suggested in his book The Souls of Black Folk, was only permitted to see and evaluate himself through the eyes of an “American world” that regarded him with “amused contempt and pity”; the result was a feeling of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Notwithstanding Park’s close ties to Du Bois’s rival, the African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), Park ([1923] 1950:291–292) invoked Du Bois and his notion of double-consciousness a full five years before introducing his own concept of the marginal man. Park’s students were also familiar with the notion of double-consciousness (Wirth Marvick 1964:336; Stonequist 1935:6–7; Stonequist 1964:338). Thus, it was likely under Du Bois’s influence that Park and his students identified the mixed-race individual as a marginal man—not by virtue of heredity, they insisted, but because of the social situation in which he typically found himself (Park 1928:893; Park [1931a] 1950:382; Stonequist 1935:7). Over time they extended the concept from mixed-race individuals to African Americans, perhaps because the line between the two populations was difficult to draw (Park [1934a] 1950:67–69; Wirth and Goldhamer 1944:340; Stonequist 1964:336; for a dissenting view from outside the Chicago school, see Myrdal 1944:699–700, 1385n28). In addition, Park’s participation in a 1923 survey of race relations on the American Pacific Coast led him to conclude that the marginal personality type was also present among Asian Americans. Describing with sympathy a young woman of Japanese ancestry who was born and grew up in the United States, Park ([1926a] 1950:248–249) noted that she was not fully accepted in either country: her American manners, dress, and language provoked resentment in Japan, while her origins made her the target of race prejudice in America. According to Park, the Asian American thus found himself or herself, like the mixed-race individual, the African American, and the modern Jew, at the intersection of two worlds, not fully at home in either and internally divided as a result.

The marginal person as Park and Stonequist conceived him or her was an ambiguous, Janus-faced figure. On the one hand, Stonequist ([1937] 1965:220–221) suggested, the marginal man’s “mental conflict” could become a “disorganizing force” preventing his “psychological integration.” Personal disorganization could, in turn, lead to social disorganization. Wirth, for instance, citing his own study of Jewish immigrant families in Chicago, linked culture conflict to delinquency (Wirth 1925; Wirth [1931] 1964:235–236). On the other hand, living simultaneously in two worlds made the marginal man “the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint” (Park, in Stonequist [1937] 1965:xvii–xviii). He was therefore well suited to become an intermediary and interpreter between the races or cultures that were represented in his own person (Park [1934b] 1950:136–137; Stonequist [1937] 1965:175, 177–179, 182; cf. Willie 1975). Furthermore, culture conflict could serve as an impetus to creativity. Veblen, who was not part of the Chicago school of sociology but spent fourteen years at the University of Chicago from 1892 until 1906, suggested as early as 1919 that the intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in the modern world stemmed from the conflict of cultures which they experienced as a result of their dispersion and migration. According to Veblen (1919), culture conflict imbued Jews with a healthy skepticism toward Jewish and gentile conventions alike, which in turn was a primary requisite for creative contributions to intellectual life. Park ([1931b] 1950:366–369) also envisioned the possibility that the marginal man might become a creative agent, particularly through his leadership of nationalist or racial mass movements. Likewise, Wirth ([1931] 1964:241) was careful to acknowledge that “not every case of culture conflict inevitably leads to delinquency…. Delinquency represents merely one way in which the conflict may be expressed if not resolved.” Echoing Park, he added that a person experiencing such conflict, “far from becoming a criminal, may develop into a prophet, a reformer or a political leader.” Stonequist made a similar point: The marginal man could seek to overcome his inner conflict by changing the external ethnic relations which had produced it. The culture conflict which he experienced as a crisis provided him with an opportunity to “reconstruct his conception of himself as well as his place or role in society,” and “those [marginal] individuals who have the potentialities to reconstruct their personalities and ‘return’ as creative agents not only adjust themselves but also contribute to the solution of the conflict of races and cultures” (Stonequist [1937] 1965:122–123, 220–221)…

Read the entire article here.