Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.
Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.
This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.
Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context, in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness. The big secret I knew — and Ms. Harris surely knows it as well — is that our Blackness was born not out of something lost but out of something gained.
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Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.
Table of Contents
Series Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Historical Context
2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
We seem to be beginning yet another season of a perennially popular American spectacle, “How Much Is That Mulatto in the Window?” I frequently think that, after 400 years, this show is about to go off the air — jump the shark, as it were. But then it returns, with ever more absurd plot lines. Yet even as a so-called mulatto myself, I can’t stop watching.
The Hollywood pitch goes something like this: Put racially ambiguous Black people in the public eye — Kamala, Meghan, Barack. Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figures of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.
On last week’s episode, Donald Trump got his cameo, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of switching races. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said during an appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. His staged bewilderment, implying that she was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery, felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions. Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulattophobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question — What are you? — someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying, of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.
Multiracial, mulatto, mixed-nuts, halfies — whatever you want to call us today, we remain the fastest-growing demographic in our country. When we enter the spotlight, we are often treated as specimens, there to be dissected, poked, debated, disputed and disinherited. We are and always have been a Rorschach test for how the world is processing its anxiety, rage, confusion and desire about this amorphous construction we call race…
