Mixed Race Studies

Neither One Nor The Other: Why I Love Being Mixed-Race

Discover Nikkei
2015-10-20

Mia Nakaji Monnier

I love those parts that seem incompatible but that, in a person, come together.

During my first week of college, I met a guy who, like me, had a long, four-part name. When I told him mine, he said, “Mine are better because they all match.”

This guy wasn’t exactly representative of my classmates at this New England liberal arts college. He was pretty obnoxious, and our friendship ended right along with freshman orientation. But he had a point. His name did match. It was a nice, genteel name, the kind you could transplant out of the 21st century and into a Jane Austen novel without anyone noticing the difference.

My name, on the other hand, is mixed and messy, alternately Japanese and French but, all together, a completely American whole: Mia Gabrielle Nakaji Monnier. In a 19th century novel, I might sound like an invading alien. But I love that. My name is a constant reminder that I’m mixed, on a borderline between worlds…

Read the entire article here.

Is There an Identity Beyond Race? Four Case Studies

Michigan Quarterly Review
Volume XLI, Issue 3, Summer 2002

Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. By Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Pp. 301. $26.95.

Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. By Rebecca Walker. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. Pp. 336. $14.

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for his White Family. By Neil Henry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. 321. $24.95.

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. By James McBride. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Pp. 228. $23.95 (hb), $14 (pb).

All four books under review here are concerned with telling dramatic tales about singular, real lives. But they are also books about race. They are driven by the larger goal of making the individual story stand for more than itself.

To write something that is true to the distinctiveness of human experience while also being socially and politically illuminating is hard to achieve. Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone’s Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White seems the most successful, perhaps because it is the only book in the group that is not a memoir. Lewis explains in an Afterword that he first stumbled on the subject while working on his dissertation seventeen years earlier, then returned to it when, as a professor at the University of Michigan, he began directing Ardizzone’s doctoral research on interracial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. They eventually decided to collaborate. The long period of gestation as well as the collaborative approach help to account for the book’s judicious tone in telling a story at once private and public, full of subjective elements yet illuminating of its social moment.

Love on Trial takes as its point of departure a sensational news story from the 1920s. Pursuing the story through careful research into court transcripts and newspaper archives, the authors piece together a fascinating narrative in which the personal intersects the social with tragic consequences.

The story centers on the marriage of Alice Jones, a nanny from Westchester, to Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, a young scion of one of New York’s oldest and richest society families. It seems that the couple met, courted, and married without apparent difficulty until their relationship became publicized by the New York press, probably through the instigation of Leonard’s disapproving father. A scandal erupted when it was alleged that Alice Jones was black—a fact that Leonard subsequently claimed he did not know and which he made the basis for an annulment suit against his wife…

Read the reviews here.

White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

New York University Press
October 2006
236 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780814736944

Ian Haney López, John H. Boalt Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

White by Law was published in 1996 to immense critical acclaim, and established Ian Haney López as one of the most exciting and talented young minds in the legal academy. The first book to fully explore the social and specifically legal construction of race, White by Law inspired a generation of critical race theorists and others interested in the intersection of race and law in American society. Today, it is used and cited widely by not only legal scholars but many others interested in race, ethnicity, culture, politics, gender, and similar socially fabricated facets of American society.

In the first edition of White by Law, Haney López traced the reasoning employed by the courts in their efforts to justify the whiteness of some and the non-whiteness of others, and revealed the criteria that were used, often arbitrarily, to determine whiteness, and thus citizenship: skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and, most importantly, popular opinion.

Ten years later, Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance. In a new, original essay written specifically for the 10th anniversary edition, he explores this racial paradigm and explains how it contributes to a system of white racial privilege socially and legally defended by restrictive definitions of what counts as race and as racism, and what doesn’t, in the eyes of the law. The book also includes a new preface, in which Haney López considers how his own personal experiences with white racial privilege helped engender White by Law.

Table of Contents

• Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Whiteness
• 1. White Lines
• 2. Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship
• 3. The Prerequisite Cases
• 4. Ozawa and Thind
• 5. The Legal Construction of Race
• 6. White Race-Consciousness
• 7. The Value to Whites of Whiteness
• 8. Colorblind White Dominance
• Appendix A. The Racial Prerequisite Cases
• Appendix B. Excerpts from Selected Prerequisite Cases
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Table of Legal Authorities
• Index
• About the Author

Rachel Dolezal, Alice Jones’ Nipples, the Rhinelander Fortune, and Racist White Fire Fighters Who Tried to Pass for ‘Black’

Indomitable: The Online Blog of Essayist and Cultural Critic Chauncey DeVega
2015-06-17

Chauncey DeVega

Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (1924).

I want to extend a sincere thanks to all of the kind folks who donated so far. I have about 10 more “thank you” emails to go. I am very close to the goal for the fundraiser. We have stalled today and hopefully if a few folks thrown in some supportive monies, I can pull in the begging bowl for another six months…

…I am not very kind to Rachel Dolezal. I chose to speak the truth about her racial con game and made my best effort to provide some context for her most offensive act of racial tourism.

Race may be a “social construct”. But the colorline–and who is considered “white” and those considered “non-white” in the United States has a deep, long, and ugly history. Those boundaries have been policed by the law, enforced by violence, and as Ian Haney Lopez notes in the brilliant book White by Law (another complement read is Cheryl Harris’s widely cited 2001 Harvard Law Review article Whiteness as Property“) white racial group membership is a type of property with economic value that has been widely litigated in America’s courtrooms.

While too much energy has already been spent on the Rachel Dolezal racial tragicomedy, one of the most important aspects of “passing” and its many variants (white to black; black to white; brown to black; black to brown; white to something else; Martian to human)–the relationship between race and the law–has been little commented upon by the mainstream pundit classes…

Legal scholar Randall Kennedy’s 2001 Ohio Law Review article “Racial Passing” is an essential and highly informative survey of the law and racial passing in the United States.

It is wonderful writing that contains moments of great wit and storytelling.

Here is a great gem (of despicable behavior) about a scandalous case among turn of the 20th century New York City high society types in which the black body, intimate knowledge, and the color of a woman’s nipples, were introduced as a type of evidence “proving” racial group membership:…

Read the entire article here.

The varied tragedy of human life furnishes few more pathetic spectacles than that of the educated mulatto who is honestly seeking the welfare of a race with which a baleful commingling of blood has inexorably identified him, — who is striving to uplift to his own level a people between whose ideals and ambitions and capabilities and his own a great gulf has been fixed by nature’s laws. Frequently inheriting from the superior race talents and aspirations the full play of which is denied him by his kinship to the inferior, — through no fault of his own he is doomed to be an anachronism in American political and social life.

Alfred Holt Stone, “The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1903, 662.