Mixed Race Studies

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarly inquiry around the subject of racial passing. The context of the current historical moment coupled with viral discussions of cultural appropriation and “blackfishing” brings a sense of urgency to understanding the long history of passing and its function in the U.S. context. Julia S. Charles’s That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing offers a perspective on this phenomenon that places performance at the heart of the racial passing experience. Charles calls for a rejection of previous scholarly treatments of passing that foreground experiences of loss among those who pass and instead argues for a focus on the opportunities that performing race offered to certain mixed-race African American citizens. Charles presents a book of theory and philosophy on racial passing meant to inform the ways scholars of African American literature and media studies can make sense of mixed-race and passing characters throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

Tyler Sperrazza, “That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles (review),” Journal of Southern History, Volume 88, Number 1, February 2022, 164. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/soh.2022.0019.

Clinical Implications for Multi-Racial Individuals

The American Journal of Family Therapy
Volume 48, 2020 – Issue 3
pages 271-282
DOI: 10.1080/01926187.2019.1709581

Natasha Finney, School of Counseling
The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio

Eman Tadros, Assistant Professor
Governors State University, University Park, Illinois

Samantha Pfeiffer, School of Counseling
The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio

Delila Owens, Professor, School of Counseling
The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio

Multi-racial individuals experience distinctive struggles and challenges that can impact their mental health. However, despite the growing population and unique presenting issues there remains a scarcity of literature to effectively support them. In addition, there is a lack of research exploring the unique experience of the multiple heritage population. The article offers implications for effectively working with individuals of multi-racial decent as well as a call to action for MFTs to develop multicultural competencies for the profession.

Read or purchase the article here.

Artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi reveals—and defies—the white supremacist underpinnings of elite gymnastics

Document Journal
2019-11-07

Miss Rosen

As Simone Biles becomes the most decorated athlete in sports, Nkosi tells Document about the implications of Black girls’ success in elite gymnastics, which has historically been used as a tool of oppression.

When Simone Biles made history at the 2019 World Championships by becoming the most decorated gymnast of any gender, she single-handedly redefined one of the world’s most elite sports. As a Black woman in a traditionally white space, she surpassed all expectations, becoming an icon in the process.

For Johannesburg-based multimedia artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Biles’ success is a testament to Black power in the face of an establishment determined to undermine it. Earlier this summer Biles invented new skills and the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), the sport’s governing body, penalized her for the groundbreaking performance. The FIG reduced the degree of Biles’ signature ‘double double’ dismount (two twists, two flips) from the beam—out of concern, they claimed, about the safety of lesser gymnasts who might harm themselves while attempting it…

…Born in New York to a South African father in exile and a Greek-American mother, Nkosi’s family moved to Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1989 when she just was eight years old. “I get this rush of emotion when I think of the day we were watching Nelson Mandela being released from prison in 1990 on TV,” Nkosi says. “My parents were looking at each other like, ‘This is it, we are going to go.’…

Read the entire article here.

Historicizing Race

Bloomsbury Academic (an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing)
2018-02-22
200 pages
9 x 6 inches
Hardback ISBN: 9781441184245
Paperback ISBN: 9781441143679
Ebook (Epub & Mobi) ISBN: 9781441158246
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781441180162

Marius Turda, Professor in 20th Century Central and Eastern European Biomedicine
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

Maria Sophia Quine, Senior Research Fellows
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

The idea of race may be outdated, as many commentators and scholars, working in a broad range of different fields in the sciences and humanities, have argued over many years. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most persistent forms of human classification. Theories of race primitivism (the idea that there is a ‘natural’ racial hierarchy and ranking order of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races), race biologism (the belief that people can be classified by genetic features which are shared by members of racial groups), and race essentialism (the notion that races can be defined by scientifically identifiable and verifiable cultural and physical characteristics) are deeply embedded in modern history, culture and politics.

Historicizing Race offers a new understanding of this reality by exploring the interconnectedness of scientific, cultural and political strands of racial thought in Europe and elsewhere. It re-conceptualises the idea of race by unearthing various historical traditions that continue to inform not only current debates about individual and collective identities, but also national and international politics. In a concise format, accessible to students and scholars alike, the authors draw out some of the reasons why race-centred thinking has, in recent years, re-emerged in such shocking and explicit form in current populist, xenophobic, and anti-immigration movements.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. History
• 2. Culture
• 3. Nation
• 4. Genealogy
• 5. Science
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Theaster Gates illuminates the dark history of Maine’s interracial exiles

Document Journal
2019-03-18

Ann Binlot

For his first solo museum exhibition in France at Palais de Tokyo, Theaster Gates explores America’s dark forgotten past through the interracial exile of Malaga Island.

“Nothing is pure in the end… A sea of wood, An island of debate. Can an exhibition start to shift the negative truths of the history of a place?”

Theaster Gates has exemplified the meaning of social practice in his work, creating new models for building community while bringing awareness to both the historical and present-day struggles of black America. In Amalgam, his first solo museum exhibition in France at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Chicago-based artist shed light on Malaga Island, a 41-acre island located at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine. The island was a fishing hamlet, home to an interracial community born out of the Civil War until 1912, when the Maine governor Frederick Plaisted forced its poorest population, a group of about 45 mixed-race individuals, off the island. Some relocated in Maine, while others were involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions. Ashamed to be associated with the island and the stigma that came with being from there, many of its descendants feared speaking about the incident, which stemmed from racism and classism…

Read the entire article here.

That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles (review)

Journal of Southern History
Volume 88, Number 1, February 2022
pages 164-165
DOI: 10.1353/soh.2022.0019

Tyler Sperrazza
University of New Haven, West Haven, Connecticut

That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing. By Julia S. Charles. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 224. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5957-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5956-5.)

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarly inquiry around the subject of racial passing. The context of the current historical moment coupled with viral discussions of cultural appropriation and “blackfishing” brings a sense of urgency to understanding the long history of passing and its function in the U.S. context. Julia S. Charles’s That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing offers a perspective on this phenomenon that places performance at the heart of the racial passing experience. Charles calls for a rejection of previous scholarly treatments of passing that foreground experiences of loss among those who pass and instead argues for a focus on the opportunities that performing race offered to certain mixed-race African American citizens. Charles presents a book of theory and philosophy on racial passing meant to inform the ways scholars of African American literature and media studies can make sense of mixed-race and passing characters throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

The title of Charles’s book also serves as its main theoretical construction. “That Middle World” is a location that Charles defines as an interstitial and metaphysical space occupied by mixed-race characters that becomes the “location of culture and identity for so-called mulattoes in African American fiction” (p. 22). This space both creates and destroys boundaries between Black and white and offers a means of interpreting passing African Americans’ experiences as a constant process of both making and crossing borders in a liminal space free of the “inadequate Black-white racial binary” (p. 40). Throughout the central chapters of the book, Charles adroitly moves between the historical lives and contexts of African American authors and the worlds their characters inhabit. Many of her subjects—Charles W. Chesnutt being central—were themselves mixed-race and able to navigate the boundaries of That Middle World in their everyday lives. Charles’s interweaving of the historical and the literary is a welcome addition to this growing field of passing studies…

Read or purchase the review here.

Belonging is Everything: Talking with Georgina Lawton

The Rumpus
2021-03-01

Donna Hemans

“My teacher’s methods were most definitely trash, but that day she taught me a valuable lesson about race,” Georgina Lawton writes in her memoir Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth about Where I Belong. “She let me know that whiteness is a wholly exclusive racial category based around notions of racial purity, and as such would never allow admittance to anyone like me.” While Lawton’s teacher had drawn boundaries around whiteness that excluded Lawton, her white, Anglo-Irish parents stubbornly insisted that their darker-skinned daughter was white like they were.

In her memoir, out now from Harper Perennial, Lawton describes her family’s silence around her racial identity, their refusal to acknowledge her difference, her own experience with racial reckoning, and the detrimental effects of growing up in a color-blind household. “As a child I spent a very long time trying to work everything out for myself before eventually becoming invested in upholding the story my parents told me: I was theirs and that’s all that mattered,” Lawton writes.

As her father is dying of cancer, Lawton and he briefly speak for the first time about the potential that their DNA is different. After her father’s death in her early twenties, Lawton embarks on a journey of self-discovery, traveling to and living in predominantly Black communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, in a bid to understand and claim her own identity. The memoir, though, is not solely about Lawton’s childhood and journey. She talks to sociologists, psychologists, and others who, like her, had a part of their identities obscured, to understand how identity is formed and its relationship with race.

I spoke to Lawton recently about the challenges of writing a memoir about a story her family would rather not confront, the necessity and value of family stories, and the lasting impact of silences…

Read the entire interview here.

Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

W. W. Norton & Company
2022-02-25
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-63409-9

Anne F. Hyde, Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries.

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full.

Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

Love Knows No Barriers

New American Library
1950 (originally published by Creative Age Press in 1947 as God is for White Folks)

Will Thomas [William Smith] (1900-1970)

Many Worlds Mingled at Riverbend Plantation

Riverbend Plantation, isolated and decaying, had seen many strange events, passionate conflict and tragic romance. In the shadows of its crumbling walls you will meet:

• Beau Beauchamp — the cast-off son of the white plantation owner and his ravishing, dark Creole mistress.
• Elisse Leseur — a beautiful blonde of mixed descent who shunned the offers of wealthy whites and poor Negroes.
• Bartolomew — an understanding Northerner who put his theories into practice and fought off an enraged mob.
• Gaynor Brackens — the hot-blooded son of the leading banker, who determined to have Elisse — at any price.