Mixed Race Studies

Racial ‘passing’ is still a reality. Here’s why I embraced my complex identity

The Boston Globe Magazine
2021-11-30

Steve Majors

For years, I passed as white. Only later did I realize the advantages I was getting made me complicit in a system that oppressed others.

I peered around the movie theater as soon as we sat down. Slowly, I began to pick out individuals who looked like my daughter and me — light complexioned Black and mixed-race people. They too, I reckoned, had come to see a movie that reflected our shared reality.

Passing, which recently moved from the big screen to Netflix and is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, tells the story of two light-skinned Black women in 1920s New York who, upon reconnecting, each grapple with the other’s relationship with race. One flouts societal and racial boundaries by “passing” as white. The other quietly wrestles with the limits imposed on her as a married Black woman.

The origins of passing stretch back to our country’s founding. For some Black people, crossing the color line meant a chance to improve their social status, economic opportunity, and marital prospects. Some scholars claim passing is no longer a phenomenon because of greater economic opportunity and stronger legal protections for Black Americans. But passing has never gone away. For many, it is a reality — but one that can be transformed into a powerful way to embrace our true identities.

For much of my life, I’ve passed as white. My “high yella” skin, as my grandmother called it, along with gray-green eyes and straight hair, hid the fact that I am mixed race. So did my family. In 1967, a year after I was born, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Still, mixed-race relationships remained socially unacceptable in some parts of the country. For me, growing up in a small town in western New York, my very existence as a mixed-race person was a personal affront to some…

Read the entire article here.

Love Medicine, A Novel (Newly Revised Edition)

Harper Perennial
2016-08-23 (Originally published in 1994)
400 pages
5x8in
Paperback ISBN: 9780061787423

Louise Erdrich

Set on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine—the first novel from master storyteller and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich—is an epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.

With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter of this stunning novel draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.

Erdrich has written a multigenerational portrait of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable whirlwind of anger, desire, and the healing power that is love medicine.

I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions

University of Oklahoma Press
October 2001
282 pages
6 X 9
12 B&W Photos
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806133546
Paperback ISBN: 9780806190143

Louis Owens (1948-2002), Professor of English and Native American Studies
University of California, Davis

In this innovative collection, Louis Owens blends autobiography, short fiction, and literary criticism to reflect on his experiences as a mixedblood Indian in America.

In sophisticated prose, Owens reveals the many timbres of his voice—humor, humility, love, joy, struggle, confusion, and clarity. We join him in the fields, farms, and ranches of California. We follow his search for a lost brother and contemplate along with him old family photographs from Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. In a final section, Owens reflects on the work and theories of other writers, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gerald Vizenor, Michael Dorris, and Louise Erdrich.

UT students, staff reflect on experiences with racial passing

The Daily Texan: Serving the University of Texas at Austin Community Since 1900
2021-12-05

Sofia Treviño, Life & Arts Senior Reporter

Julius Shieh/The Daily Texan

Disliking her paler skin compared to other darker-complected Hispanics growing up, Rachel González-Martin spent hours lying under the sun willing herself to tan. Only burning and turning red, she grew frustrated. González-Martin wanted others to easily recognize her as Hispanic.

“There’s who we know we are and how we tell our own story, but we can never escape from what people see in us or read from our appearance,” the associate professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies said.

Racial passing — a term used to describe those perceived as a member of another racial group than their own — can affect how closely people connect to and feel a part of their communities. For UT students and staff, the process of navigating different cultural stereotypes and learning to embrace their identities regardless of their appearance remains a lifelong project.

Growing up in Oakland, California, with very few fellow Hispanics, González-Martin felt she needed to physically show her identity. However, as she’s grown older, she said she’s learned to accept her own meaning of belonging to a community aside from outside biases…

Read the entire article here.

We trust artists like Michelle Latimer to avoid harming Indigenous people

NOW Toronto
2020-12-21

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers explains the particular kind of pain revelations about Michelle Latimer have caused within the Indigenous film community

We were gathered for a filmmaking workshop at the Urban Native Youth Association in East Vancouver. I was co-facilitating with filmmaker Jessica Hallenbeck. One participant was that particular kind of shy brown-skinned Indigenous teenage boy who didn’t yet know his worth in this world. He wore sweatpants, a hoodie and sneakers, and had a head of thick black hair. He was afraid to smile, much less make eye contact with the other teens in the room.

I’d asked the young people to introduce themselves – to give us their names, where they come from and what they found most exciting about film. When his turn came, he kept his gaze steady on one spot on the floor as he quietly shared his name and that he was from Vancouver. I interjected. “And, what nation are you from?” He paused, and then whispered, “I don’t know.”

My heart sank to untold depths. I had just inadvertently implied that an Indigenous youth who grew up in foster care didn’t belong. Belonging is everything in Indigenous communities, but at that moment I made him feel so small. I still carry the shame from that interaction, knowing I could not undo that harm.

People wonder how former Trickster director Michelle Latimer, whose identity has recently come under scrutiny, could claim to be Indigenous for so long without skepticism. She was trusted because the Indigenous film community is protective. We want to avoid doing harm to those who have experienced the trauma of displacement…

Read the entire article here.

The Colors of Love: Multiracial People in Interracial Relationships

New York University Press
December 2021
312 Pages
24 b/w illustrations
6.00 x 9.00 x 0.00 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781479802418
Hardcover ISBN: 9781479802401
eBook ISBN: 9781479802425

Melinda A. Mills, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology; Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies
Castleton University, Castleton, Vermont

How multiracial people navigate the complexities of race and love

In the United States, more than seven million people claim to be multiracial, or have racially mixed heritage, parentage, or ancestry. In The Colors of Love, Melinda A. Mills explores how multiracial people navigate their complex—and often misunderstood—identities in romantic relationships.

Drawing on sixty interviews with multiracial people in interracial relationships, Mills explores how people define and assert their racial identities both on their own and with their partners. She shows us how similarities and differences in identity, skin color, and racial composition shape how multiracial people choose, experience, and navigate love.

Mills highlights the unexpected ways in which multiracial individuals choose to both support and subvert the borders of race as individuals and as romantic partners. The Colors of Love broadens our understanding about race and love in the twenty-first century.

How disgraced health expert Carrie Bourassa passed as indigenous for years

The New York Post
2021-12-01

Isabel Vincent, Investigative reporter

Carrie Bourassa’s Instagram page describes her as an “Indigenous feminist” and “proud Metis” with an addiction to lattes.

Only her penchant for caffeine was true.

A statement from Carrie Bourassa’s team said “she has not falsely identified as Indigenous nor taken space away from Indigenous peoples.”

Bourassa, a professor in the department of community health and epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan and a leading expert on indigenous issues, has been exposed as a fraud. A family tree prepared by a group of academics who were suspicious of her ancestral claims shows that Bourassa is of Swiss, Hungarian, Polish and Czechoslovakian origins and has not one ounce of indigenous blood…

Read the entire article here.

Rebecca Hall Says ‘Passing’ Liberated Her Family – Contenders New York

Deadline Hollywood
2021-12-04

Fred Topel

Rebecca Hall said Saturday that her mother [Maria Ewing] told her Hall’s directorial debut, Passing, liberated her family, as Hall’s grandfather was a Black man who decided to pass for White in Detroit.

Hall and stars Ruth Negga and André Holland spoke during the panel for the Netflix drama at Deadline’s Contenders Film: New York awards-season showcase.

“She called me up in tears when she first saw it and she just said, ‘You’ve liberated us,’” Hall said. “I grew up observing my mother and thinking about the psychological impact of being brought up in an environment where you weren’t allowed to talk about something. To me, she always looked like a Black woman. I was saying to her, ‘Tell me about this. What are we? Tell me the story.’ She didn’t know. It’s not that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She was respecting her father’s wishes.”…

Read the entire article and watch the video discussion here.

Walking the Color Line in 1909

Bygone Brookland
2020-05-21

Robert Malesky

Little 7-year-old Isabel Wall, blonde and blue-eyed, bounced along beside her mother as they walked the two blocks from their home at 1019 Kearny Street to the Brookland School at 10th and Monroe. Isabel was to be enrolled in the first grade.

The principal, Mary Little, asked some basic questions and then filled out the form to admit the child and let her begin classes. It wasn’t to last. Ten days later, she withdrew the admission, due to “information subsequently obtained.” The information? School officials had heard that Isabel’s father, Stephen, though he was light-skinned and had a white wife, was in reality a black man. The Brookland School was for whites only…

Note from Steven F. Riley: see the book The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America by Daniel J. Sharfstein.

Read the entire article here.

The extent to which elite universities like Columbia worked to keep black students outside their walls makes the accomplishments of Columbia’s hailed “first” black graduates even more impressive, as these students existed within institutions that found identity through racialized exclusivity. That being said, James Parker Barnett’s story highlights a problem with these narratives of “firsts”, not only within Columbia University, but at historically white institutions across the United States. As mentioned above, Columbia’s refusal to admit black students into the University created the conditions that encouraged black students to pass as white, and James Parker Barnett may be a case of just that. However, the only reason we know about James Parker Barnett was because he was caught. There were high levels of racial mixing occurring in the United States through the 1850s when Barnett was expelled from P&S [School of Physicians and Scientists], and estimates about the frequency of racial passing are contentious. Walter White, a famous fair-skinned black man who passed as white while doing investigative work for the NAACP, estimated that “approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear” into white society every year”.⁵² Roi Ottley, a famous African-American journalist in the early 1900s, claimed that there were approximately five million white-passing black people with forty to fifty thousand passing into whiteness every year.⁵³ While these men lived in the early to mid-1900’s, well past Barnett’s time, their research proves that racial passing had become increasingly common as African descendants continued to mix with those of white ancestry. I argue that this information lends itself to the idea that it was highly unlikely that Barnett, if indeed passing, was the first nor the last black individual to pass as white at Columbia University before it officially began accepting black students. How then, can the university endeavor to honor the “first black” students at Columbia if it has no way of knowing the identities of black passers who, by racial standards of the time, were the first graduating students of African “blood”?

Ciara Keane, “Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at Columbia University,” Columbia University and Slavery, 2018. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/blurring-lines-james-parker-barnett-racial-passing-and-invisible-early-black-students.