Mixed Race Studies

Can I Call My Nonbiological Twins Black Because My Husband Is?

The Ethicist
The New York Times Magazine
2016-01-27

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy, Law
New York University

Illustration by Tomi Um

I’m a Caucasian woman married to an African-American man. Shortly after we married, I discovered that I couldn’t conceive my own biological children. We opted to ‘‘adopt’’ two embryos. (Couples who have successfully undergone in-vitro fertilization and don’t wish to have more children can donate remaining embryos to other couples.) I was soon pregnant and gave birth to twins. Based on the records of the fertility clinic, we know that our children are genetically mixed Hispanic and Caucasian. I am not comfortable being open about the origin of my children, except with family and close friends, until they are old enough for me to explain it to them. However, several times in the last three years, I’ve been asked about their race, most recently on a pre-K school application form. On this form, there is no option of ‘‘mixed race’’ or ‘‘other.’’ Therefore, I identified my children as black. Was this the right choice? Name Withheld, Chicago

Ethics generally commends telling the truth. But in a situation in which our ordinary ways of thinking are at odds with reality, there can be no easy truth to be had. When it comes to race, confusion is the most intellectually defensible position. Let’s try to sow some. If your children were your biological children, many people in our society would say that they were African-American, because we have a tradition, going back before emancipation, of treating people with one black parent as black . . . or Negro or colored or whatever the favored term was at various times in American history. That’s the ‘‘one-drop rule,’’ so called because consistent application of it would mean that anyone with any African ancestry at all was black. (Of course, unbeknown to those who started this system, we all have African ancestry in the long run, which shows how much our thinking is shaped by our lack of knowledge.)…

As it happens, millions of Americans are black according to the one-drop rule but don’t have any of the features that people associate with African ancestry. Lots of them ‘‘pass’’ for white. Many don’t, though. Walter White, the early-20th-century leader of the N.A.A.C.P., was able to travel the South investigating lynchings because, although his parents were ex-slaves, he ‘‘looked white.’’ His autobiography begins: ‘‘I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.’’ (In a bio­pic, he could have been played by, oh, Bryan Cranston.) ‘‘ ’Cause it’s swell to have a leader/That can pass for white,’’ wrote Langston Hughes, who with his ‘‘copper-brown skin and straight black hair’’ — his description — was himself taken for white during a trip to Africa and could have passed for Indian if he troubled himself to do so…

Read the entire article here.

Realist Historiography and the Legacies of Reconstruction in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

American Literary Realism
Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016
pages 147-165

Peter Zogas

Charles W. Chesnutt had high hopes for his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). He thought that his retelling of the 1898 race riot and Democratic coup in Wilmington, N.C., was “by far the best thing I have done,” and he noted in a letter to Booker T. Washington that he thought he “may have ‘arrived’ with this book.” Chesnutt’s optimism extended to the political effects The Marrow of Tradition might have as well. The novel “is not a study in pessimism,” he noted, “for it is the writer’s belief that the forces of progress will in the end prevail, and that in time a remedy may be found for every social ill.” However, it was not the success that Chesnutt had hoped for, and critics, most famously W. D. Howells, objected to its portrayal of race relations punctuated by violence and revolution.

Yet we can consider the significance of Chesnutt’s optimism and desire for progress in relation to Amy Kaplan’s analysis of realism as an encounter with the mechanisms of social change. In The Marrow of Tradition this encounter takes on a decidedly historiographic dimension. The precarious hope presented by the novel’s final line—“There’s time enough, but none to spare!”—references pressing concerns ranging from the restructuring of the local and national political systems to the enfranchisement of freed slaves, threats of racial violence, and the necessity of economic reform (718). In this way, we can read The Marrow of Tradition as intimately engaged with the legacies of Reconstruction and offering a counterpoint to Chesnutt’s more explicit treatment in his later novel The Colonel’s Dream (1905). The progress that Chesnutt anticipates ties his project of realism with the contested status of Reconstruction as a historical concept at the turn of the twentieth century. Chesnutt’s particular employment of realism creates a historiographic project that contests contemporaneously emerging narratives of Reconstruction that would play a determining role in imagining the nation’s progress into the twentieth century.

William A. Dunning and the South’s “cruel dilemma”

The era of Reconstruction was first conceptualized in historical discourse during the late 1880s and 1890s, most systematically through the work of the historian William A. Dunning. As one of a new generation of historians who followed positivistic methodologies, Dunning was deeply involved in establishing history as an academic field in the United States. He was awarded his Ph.D. by Columbia University in 1885, and he expanded his dissertation to be published as Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1898 (a revised edition appeared in 1904). Like many of his peers, Dunning spent time in Berlin studying under the influence of Leopold von Ranke, and beginning in 1886 he served on the faculty of Columbia, where he taught until his death in 1922. During that time Dunning trained an influential generation of graduate students, and many of them completed their doctoral work by writing accounts of Reconstruction efforts in individual states.

Contemporary readers are quick to grasp the racial prejudice at work in the histories of Dunning and his disciples, to the extent that it is easy to lose sight of just how influential such work was throughout much of the twentieth century. It was not until after the Civil Rights era that Dunning’s basic narrative of Reconstruction as a failed project—one anchored in misguided attempts to enfranchise African Americans while simultaneously disenfranchising whites through post-war loyalty oaths—was dismantled in historical studies. But this is not to say that his pronouncements went unchallenged. As early as 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois identified the central thesis in the so-called “Columbia school”: “first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt, or silence for the Negro; third, a judicial attitude towards the North, which concludes that the North under great misapprehension did a grievous wrong, but eventually saw its mistake and retreated.” For Du Bois, Dunning’s methods clearly demonstrate the prejudiced political and racial attitudes that determine his analysis. Of Dunning’s explicit vilification of African Americans, Du Bois pointedly asks, “if the negro was admittedly sub-human, what need to waste time delving into…

“I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct as people do these days.”

“…The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don’t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there’s one answer to that. But I don’t feel badly that I didn’t.” —Danzy Senna

Tamara Wieder, “Saving Race,” The Boston Phoenix, May 14-20, 2004. http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/qa/multi_1/documents/03827943.asp.

Author Junot Díaz Packs Thorne Hall

Oxy Newsroom
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California
2015-09-23

Media Contact: Jim Tranquada / (323) 259-2990

Marc Campos/Occidental College

Ranging from profane to profound, from wisecracking to wistful, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz discussed the complexities and heartbreak of race and identity in America with a capacity crowd at Occidental College Tuesday.

For two hours, Díaz mixed readings from his critically acclaimed books The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her with thoughtful, often self-deprecatory answers to questions from the crowd of 800 students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members that packed Thorne Hall.

Diaz was introduced by novelist Danzy Senna, Occidental’s writer-in-residence and an old friend, who called him “One of the few writers I teach again and again, year after year … His characters contain multitudes.”

A native of the Dominican Republic who emigrated to the United States as a child, Díaz repeatedly critiqued the idea of authenticity among communities of color – the existence of an internal formula or standard of authenticity that leaves most people believing that their identity, and the lives they lead, are somehow lacking.

“I grew up in central Jersey in a big African-American community, and black folks were no more willing to accept my complexity than white folks … they wanted to deny my multiplicity. They said I was just black. And my Dominican family said we’re not black,” he said. “Neither of these formulas satisfy, because a huge portion of me disappears. I fought tooth and nail so every little part of me could be at the party.”

Such formulas tend to create hierarchies, and “solidarity is impossible with hierarchies,” he continued. “It might give you a little psychic capital, but its disrupts your ability to connect … There’s a lot at stake when a community exercises this kind of internal exclusion.”…

Read the entire article here.

Her Father’s People

Stanford Magazine
July/August 2009

Erin Aubry Kaplan

Antonin Kratochvil WEDDED IDEALISM: Danzy Senna was the middle child born to Fanny Howe and Carl Senna.

For years, Danzy Senna thoughtfully explored issues of race and identity in fiction, including her novels Caucasia and Symptomatic. And then one day the author, walking through Harvard Square, found herself surrounded by signs, buildings and businesses bearing the names and images of Boston’s most prominent families. DeWolfe, Quincy, Howe—they were names of Senna’s forebears via her mother, poet and professor Fanny Howe.

The display reminded Senna, ’92, how much she had always known about her mother’s people—and how little she knew about her father’s. In 1968, Carl Senna, soon to become the youngest editor at Beacon Press, and Fanny Howe married—a commitment that was headily symbolic (personal but also political) in that Carl was black and from Southern poverty, while Fanny, ’62, was white and raised with Mayflower privilege. Their wedding photograph, Danzy Senna writes, showed “the ‘Negro of exceptional promise’ taking the hand of the descendant of slave traders.”

As Senna contemplated those names in Boston, she thought, “What about my father’s side?” After all, “he gave me both my first and last names. Yet I knew so little about him.” So begins her nonfiction book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which seeks to bring some balance to her family history, and to a larger narrative that reflexively puts whites at the center of the American story and blacks at the margins…

Read the entire article here.

White Earth members approve new constitution

The Minneapolis Star Tribune
2013-11-21

Pam Louwagie

New constitution does away with blood quantum rule.

In a historic vote that could vastly increase their membership, White Earth Band of Ojibwe members have overwhelmingly approved a new constitution.

The new document removes a requirement that tribal citizens possess one-quarter Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood, a controversial “blood quantum” standard adopted at the urging of the federal government decades ago. Under the new constitution, White Earth’s declining citizenship will instead be based on lineal descent.

The change could mean more than doubling the population, which now stands at under 20,000.

According to ballots counted Tuesday night, nearly 80 percent of the nearly 3,500 votes cast approved of adopting a new constitution, which in addition to changing citizenship standards will create a tribal government with three branches and a separation of powers instead of one tribal council overseeing everything.

The old citizenship standard was divisive among families, with some members having children or grandchildren who couldn’t become citizens, said Jill Doerfler, associate professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Lineage citizenship won’t be automatic, however. People will still need to apply to become citizens, said Doerfler, who consulted with the tribe on reforming the constitution…

Read the entire article here.

In order to create a just society for Americans of every race—and multiple races—we need to officially acknowledge and protect the rights of multiracial people. Mono-racial policies leave growing numbers of Americans unprotected from racial discrimination. It is time for race policy in the U.S. to acknowledge the nation’s new demographics and work for a racially just society for all.

Kathleen Odell Korgen, “Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans,” Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol, January 27, 2016. https://policypress.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/why-race-policy-must-include-multiracial-americans/.

Saving race

The Boston Phoenix
May 14-20, 2004

Tamara Wieder

With Symptomatic, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel Caucasia, Danzy Senna again delves into race in America — and defies second-book syndrome

IT’S EVERY YOUNG writer’s dream: to have a first novel achieve critical acclaim and monetary success. But a dream is usually all it is, and for Danzy Senna, it was no different. She certainly didn’t expect the attention and praise her debut novel, Caucasia (Riverhead Books, 1998), received; after all, the book was originally written as her graduate-school thesis.

Senna, the biracial daughter of poet Fanny Howe and activist and writer Carl Senna, was raised in Boston in the 1970s — not exactly a hotbed of tolerance for mixed-race families. Her experiences in Boston and beyond have helped mold her as a writer; Caucasia told the story of biracial sisters dealing with some of the same ugliness doled out to her own family. Senna has also written extensively on the frequent experience of being mistaken for white, and how it’s led to an uncomfortable exposure of prejudices and intolerance in those around her.

In her latest novel, Symptomatic (Riverhead Books), Senna again surveys a familiar racial landscape. Her narrator is a biracial young woman often mistaken for white; she develops a friendship with an older, similarly mixed-race woman that begins as an antidote to loneliness and alienation, but gradually grows into something both complicated and frightening.

Q: Tell me where the idea for Symptomatic came from, and how you ended up writing it.

A: I love thrillers, and I love the old Roman Polanski, Hitchcock thrillers, and I wanted to think about race and identity and use the kind of thriller plot. And I was interested in the sort of claustrophobia of race, and the claustrophobia of identity, and how you can sort of become trapped by it. But in this case it’s more literal. I was also interested in doubles, and that comfort that you initially feel when you have an identification with someone, and how that can kind of turn smothering. So racial identity, and then identity in general, sort of as something that can be comforting and terrifying and smothering, all at once…

…Q: You wrote in an essay that “in Boston circa 1975, mixed wasn’t really an option.” How did you deal with that?

A: I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct as people do these days.

Q: Did you ever feel resentful that mixed wasn’t an option?

A: I didn’t desire that as an option. The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don’t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there’s one answer to that. But I don’t feel badly that I didn’t…

Read the entire interview here.

Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans

Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol
2016-01-27

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Today’s guest blog by Kathleen Odell Korgen, whose book Race policy and multi-racial Americans published this month, examines the much overlooked issue of including multiracial Americans in policy making and explains why this oversight must stop.

Americans who identify as multiracial comprise approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population. With a growth rate three times that the rest of the population, this percentage will rise quickly (U.S. Census Bureau 2012; Frey 2014; Pew Research Center 2015).

One would never know this, however, by viewing the nation’s race policies. A look at policies across a variety of areas, including public school curricula, health policy, and prison regulations, reveals little trace of the existence of growing numbers of Americans who identify as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans

Policy Press (Available in North America from University of Chicago Press)
2016-01-13
226 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781447316459
Paperback ISBN: 9781447316503

Edited by:

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans is the first book to look at the impact of multiracial people on race policies—where they lag behind the growing numbers of multiracial people in the U.S. and how they can be used to promote racial justice for multiracial Americans. Using a critical mixed race perspective, it covers such questions as: Which policies aimed at combating racial discrimination should cover multiracial Americans? Should all (or some) multiracial Americans benefit from affirmative action programmes? How can we better understand the education and health needs of multiracial Americans? This much-needed book is essential reading for sociology, political science and public policy students, policy makers, and anyone interested in race relations and social justice.

Contents

• Introduction ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Multiracial Americans throughout the History of the U.S. ~ Tyrone Nagai
• National and Local Structures of Inequality: Multiracial Groups’ Profiles Across the United States ~ Mary E. Campbell and Jessica M. Barron
• Latinos and Multiracial America ~ Raúl Quiñones Rosado
• The Connections among Racial Identity, Social Class, and Public Policy? ~ Nikki Khanna
• Multiracial Americans and Racial Discrimination ~ Tina Fernandes Botts
• “Should All (or Some) Multiracial Americans Benefit from Affirmative Action Programs?”~ Daniel N. Lipson
• Multiracial Students and Educational Policy ~ Rhina Fernandes Williams and E. Namisi Chilungu
• Multiracial Americans in College ~ Marc P. Johnston and Kristen A. Renn
• Multiracial Americans, Health Patterns, and Health Policy: Assessment and Recommendations for Ways Forward ~ Jenifer L. Bratter and Chirsta Mason
• Racial Identity Among Multiracial Prisoners in the Color-Blind Era ~ Gennifer Furst and Kathleen Odell Korgen
• “Multiraciality and the Racial Order: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”~ Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and David L. Brunsma
• Multiracial Identity and Monoracial Conflict: Toward a New Social Justice framework ~ Andrew Jolivette
• Conclusion: Policies for a Racially Just Society ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen