Mixed Race Studies

Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at Columbia University

Columbia University and Slavery
Columbia University, New York, New York
2018

Ciara Keane

Discussions of racial passing have never been simple, as racial passing involves the traversing of social systems and the manipulation of power structures in a way that is often unsettling. Racial passing, according to Randall Kennedy, is a “deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct”.¹ The most typical form of passing that has historically occurred in the United States is that of a black person passing as a white person; in other words, a person who has black ancestry that would societally deem him to be black moving throughout society identifying and performing as a white person. It is important to distinguish between a passer and a person who is not aware of their racial ancestry; while a passer is actively cognizant of their background and intentionally living as another race, many individuals are simply unaware of their race and fully believe themselves to be of the race they are living as, even though the facts of their racial ancestry would classify them as a different race than the one they identify as.² The reasons for racial passing vary, but individuals usually decide to pass in order to reap the benefits that come with being of the race they are passing as. For example, a person may pass in order to access better job prospects, receive a higher level of education, or to occupy any other space that was typically off limits for their race.³

In a society like that of the United States which exists as a social hierarchy stratified by race and class, racial passers have been considered a significant threat to the structures that uphold white supremacy. For white people in America, “the core of ‘the American national character’ was a denial of legitimacy and privilege based exclusively on descent”.⁴ In other words, American society was and is inherently structured based on the hoarding of privilege by the white race and the denial of this privilege to minority groups, which above all applies to African-Americans. Therefore, minorities who pass as white pose a grave threat to the maintenance of this structure, as the act of passing blurs the barrier between the privileged elite and the oppressed. Although the infamous one-drop rule was not formally adopted until the 1920s⁵, the American South’s desire to hold onto the racial caste created by slavery led the entire nation to spend the years of 1850 to 1915 “turning from a society in which some blackness in a person might be overlooked to one in which no single iota of color was excused”.⁶ States like North Carolina and Virginia had laws prior to the solidification of the one-drop rule within the 18th and 19th century that defined as white those with less than one-fourth, one-eighth, or one-sixteenth African “blood”, but these rules were always overridden by rules of slavery which could deem even a person with one-sixty-fourth black “blood” to be black if their mother was a slave.⁷ By time the one-drop rule was written into law, which classified a person as black if they had any hint of African “blood” no matter how small and no matter their phenotypical appearance, any advantage that Mulattos may have enjoyed post-slavery that elevated them slightly above Black people without any white “blood” had long disappeared, and Mulattoes had been solidified as indistinguishable from any other member of the black race.⁸…

Read the entire article here.

Pioneers on the playing field: Bruno’s first Black athletes and coaches

The Brown Daily Herald
Providence, Rhode Island
2021-02-18

Peter Swope, Senior Staff Writer

Looking back at Jackie Court, other Black trailblazers in Brown Athletics program

While today’s Brown Athletics program displays diversity among its coaches and athletes, this has not always been the case. Throughout the history of Brown Athletics, trailblazing Black athletes and coaches have battled racism and adversity to earn athletic achievements while helping to build a more equitable program. This week The Herald will feature baseball player William White, class of 1883, football player Fritz Pollard, class of 1919 and gymnastics coach Jackie Court, who each contributed to the development of Brown Athletics on and off the field.

“William Edward White was the first African-American to play in the professional baseball ranks,” according to Brown Athletics archivist Peter Mackie ’59. “He played one game for the Providence Grays … (few people know) about him, but if you look at a picture of that 1879 team, there he is.”

White was born in Milner, Georgia; his mother was a formerly enslaved African-American woman and his father was a wealthy white man. White and his siblings attended Moses Brown School before being accepted to Brown through a connection via a local Baptist church. As a dually-enrolled student, White was a first baseman for the Brown baseball team while still a senior at Moses Brown…

Read the entire article here.

The Shields Family: A Dichotomy of Race in US Society through Two Family Lines

Methods of Historical Research: Spring 2021
Texas A&M University, San Antonio
April 2021
18 pages

Joseph C. Platt

We spent the entirety of our Spring 2021 semester on Zoom, as our communities continued to struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of TAMUSA librarian Deirdre McDonald, we added the students’ research papers to the Digital Commons collection on Black San Antonio history we created the previous year.

The history of the Shields families of North and South Carolina, beginning with William Bryant Shields Sr. and Moses Shields respectively, offer dichotomous responses to American racial hierarchies over the decades. Generations of race mixing within the Shields family has its roots in the sons of Irish immigrants pursuing relationships with enslaved women. The one-sided nature of the power dynamic in these relationships takes on different dimensions in the lives of the mixed-race children of William Bryant Shields Sr. and the lives of Moses’ son, Henry Wells Shields, Henry’s slave Melvinia Shields, and her children. Both family lines take efforts to repress their black ancestry, one primarily through dilution through marriage and the other through a refusal of formal acknowledgement, which ironically enabled some of their children to flourish in African American society. The permeability of race can be gleaned through these two Shields family lines both in how they went about repressing their ties to enslaved black women and how these culminated in the present-day Shields descendants, Roseanne Cash and Michelle Obama.

Read the entire article here.

How Nella Larsen’s Passing deconstructed the question of race

The New Statesman
2021-11-12

Gary Younge, Professor of Sociology
University of Manchester

Larsen’s 1929 novel, now a Netflix film, illustrates the degree to which race is a construct – without lecturing the reader.

“Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear,” Walter White, the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, wrote in a 1947 article. “People whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration… Men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on them.”

White had first-hand experience. The black president of the NAACP had blonde hair and blue eyes. He would “disappear” himself from time to time, so that he could safely investigate lynching in the American South. The piece, published in TIME magazine, was called “Why I Choose to Remain a Negro”.

The term “passing” relates to those who disappear – pretending to be something, and therefore someone, that they are not, usually in search of a better, safer or easier life. The practice is not limited to race. It could be a Jew posing as a gentile; a Catholic as a Protestant. But the challenges remain the same and lend themselves easily to narrative tension – the need to cut yourself off from your past, the fear of being discovered, the construction of a life that is a lie.

Nella Larsen’s laconic novella, Passing, draws from the human toll and intrigue that emerges from the transgression, subterfuge and outright deceit involved in an African American woman passing as white in 1920s America. Published in 1929, it has been adapted into a film by the British actor Rebecca Hall, now streaming on Netflix. The novella has long been one of my favourites among the works from the Harlem Renaissance, the literary movement that emerged among black artists and writers in 20th-century New York and saw the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and Aaron Douglas become prominent. Sparsely written, character-driven and emotionally complex, it illustrates the degree to which black is a political colour, race is a construct, and racism is a system in which colour is a component, not a determinant – without actually lecturing the reader on any of that…

Read the entire article here.

Web extra: Passing and the disassociation from one’s past

CBS Sunday Morning
2021-10-24

In this web exclusive, Joy Bivins, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, talks with Michelle Miller about the personal impact of someone of mixed race passing for White (or Black).

Black Judaism

The St. Louis American
2021-11-12

Danielle Brown, Reporter

Black authors’ works about astronomy, domestic violence featured in Jewish book fest

Judaism faith believers and individuals curious about religion can attend this year’s 43rd Annual St. Louis Jewish Book Fest virtually or in person at the Jewish Community Center’s Staenberg Family Complex in Creve Coeur.

Ross’ book “Playing Dead” narrates how the marriage to her high school sweetheart became a horrific nightmare that resulted in domestic violence, abuse, endless stalking, and a traumatizing near-death experience.

The relationship became so toxic she moved her and their three kids from the house. She thought that was the right move to make for her and her children’s safety. Until one morning her husband Chris kidnapped her in front of their kids. He took her to the woods, raped her, beat her mercilessly in the head with a shovel and left her body in the woods assuming she was dead. She wasn’t, she played dead to get out alive…

…Prescod-Weinstein’s book “The Disordered Cosmos” was inspired by a collection of essays she wrote addressing how race, gender and bias shape how science is done specifically in physics and astronomy. She said the book transformed into what she always dreamed of doing as a teenager, which was to write a book about particle physics and astronomy for people of her community.

“My point of view of the book is a holistic look at the doing of particle physics, the doing of astronomy,” she said. “Not just through the lens of what are the things we’re calculating, what are the ideas that we’re working through on a technical level, but how it works as a culture and a social phenomenon.” she said.

One of Prescod-Weinstein’s themes for her book is having the fundamental right to love the night sky. She said it comes from her mother, Margaret Prescod, a Black feminist with experience in organizing, who said people need to know there’s a universe beyond the bad things that are happening. She said her comment came after protests and unrest occurred following the murder of an African American killed by police…

Read the entire article here.

Long before Charlottesville, ‘great replacement theory’ found its champion in a racist senator

The Washington Post
2021-11-15

Martha Hamilton

Four years ago, torch-bearing “Unite the Right” demonstrators, including Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, marched into Charlottesville, shouting, “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter.” The next day, they clashed with counter-protesters, leaving one woman dead and a nation stunned.

Two-dozen participants in the rally are now on trial in a civil case, accused of conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.

Some of the Charlottesville demonstrators were motivated by an ideology known as the “great replacement theory,” which warns that an increase in the non-White population fueled by immigration will destroy White and Western civilization.

That ideology has inspired a lot of recent violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where the shooter warned of “White genocide” before pleading guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and engaging in a terrorist act.

But the great replacement theory isn’t new. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization. And as with the Charlottesville defendants, his incitements to racial violence that gave him a spotlight also got him into serious trouble.

Theodore G. Bilbo had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History…

Read the entire article here.

A Colored Man Round the World

University of Michigan Press
1999 (originally published in 1858)
232 pages
3 drawings.
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-472-09694-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-06694-0

David F. Dorr (ca. 1827-1872)

Edited by:

Malini Johar Schueller, Professor of English
University of Florida

London, Paris, Constantinople, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem in the 1850s—as seen through the eyes of a former slave

This remarkable book, written by former slave David F. Dorr, published in the mid-nineteenth century and only recently rediscovered, is an uncommon travel narrative. In the 1850s Dorr accompanied Louisiana plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes on a tour of the world’s major cities, with the promise that when they returned to the United States, Dorr would be given his freedom. When that promise was broken, Dorr escaped to Ohio and wrote of his experiences in A Colored Man Round the World.

Malini Johar Schueller has edited and annotated the 1858 text and added a critical introduction that provides a useful context for understanding and appreciating this important but heretofore neglected document. Her edition of A Colored Man Round the World provides a fascinating account of Dorr’s negotiation of the conflicting roles of slave versus man, taking into account all of the racial complexities that existed at the time. As a traveler abroad, Dorr claimed an American selfhood that allowed him mobility in Europe, and he benefited from the privileges accorded American “Orientalists” venturing in the near East. However, any empowerment that Dorr experienced while a tourist vanished upon his return to America.

The book will be welcomed for the rare perspective it provides of the mid-nineteenth century, through the eyes of an African-American slave and for the light it casts on world and U.S. history as well as on questions of racial and national identity.