Mixed Race Studies

Gwinnett Street Colored Folks Are Talking About the Marriage of the White Man to the Octoroon

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Thursday, 1898-03-31
page 2, column 5
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection

The colored folks in Gwinnett Street are talking to-day of the marriage which took place two weeks ago. Miss Zoe Ball, a vocalist and pianist, to William L. Morton, a commercial traveler and former variety show manager. Morton is white, but his wife is an octoroon. It is said that they first met in a local music hall last Summer and that Morton became infatuated with Miss Ball from the first.

The marriage was performed at 125 Harrison Avenue, on March 16, by the Rev. H. Guelich. The couple had made two previous calls at the rectory and had interviews with the Rev. Mr. Guelich. He expressed his willingness to marry them and on the evening of the 16th, between 7 and 8 o’clock they called with two witnesses, George Burrell and Edith Camp, both colored.

Speaking to an Eagle reporter this morning the Rev. Mr. Guelich said that he was surprised that there should have been any talk or gossip about the marriage. He said he was not aware Miss Ball was a negress. He said he could not discern the difference between her and a white woman. She gave her age as 24 and her birthplace as Louisville, Ky. Morton said that he was 34 and that he was born in Newark, N.J.

De Blasio Takes His Modern Family on the Campaign Trail

The New York Times
2013-08-07

Michael Barbaro

As his S.U.V. sped down the West Side Highway a few days ago, 30 minutes late to a campaign stop, Bill de Blasio, a Democratic mayoral candidate, proposed a simple solution: let his wife do the talking instead of him.

“Is Chirlane there?” he asked an aide, as he began placing a call on his cellphone to his wife. “I already warned her she should be prepared to speak.”

For the next five minutes, Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, and his wife, Chirlane McCray, traded talking points while she prepared to address an angry crowd of hospital workers in Brooklyn.

It was a small but telling glimpse into a candidacy that, to a remarkable degree, has thrust family into a starring role — in campaign literature and debate preparation sessions, at political rallies and at subway meet-and-greets…

…In a city where white residents are becoming a minority of the voting population, the family-centric strategy has allowed Mr. de Blasio, who is Italian-American, to portray himself as a paragon of modern, middle-class, multicultural New York: Ms. McCray is black and the couple has two children, Dante and Chiara, 18…

…In the most powerful moment of the new ad, Mr. de Blasio’s son takes aim at Mr. Bloomberg’s reliance on police stops and searches, which have had an outsize impact on young black men. Looking into the camera, Dante de Blasio promises that his father will be the “only one who will end an era of stop-and-frisk that unfairly targets people of color.”…

Read the entire article here.

Colleges Help Ithaca Thrive In a Region Of Struggles

The New York Times
2013-08-04

Jesse McKinley

ITHACA, N.Y. — In many ways, this city is not so special. It has a nice lake, some attractive houses with lawns, and a couple of colleges. But many places in upstate New York have lakes and lawns and places of high learning.

What most sets this city of 30,000 apart from many of its neighbors these days is what is absent: fear for its future.

Led by a young mayor with an inspiring back story and an idealist’s approach — he talks about sidewalks in philosophical terms — Ithaca is the upstate exception: a successful liberal enclave in a largely conservative region troubled by unemployment woes, declining or stagnant population, and post-Detroit talk of bankruptcy.

“It’s like a little San Francisco,” Nicole Roulstin, 32, an Ithaca resident, said recently, “or the Berkeley of the East.”

Much of that optimism comes from a reciprocal relationship with two institutions — Cornell University and, to a lesser degree, Ithaca College — which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and created thousands of jobs for everyone from professors to landscapers, and also fostered new companies. Ithaca and its home county, Tompkins, regularly post the lowest unemployment rate in the state. In June, Ithaca’s was 5.7 percent, tied with another college city, Saratoga Springs, where a racetrack drives an annual summer boom.

Ithaca’s model of education as an economic engine is one that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made a priority this year as a strategy for all of upstate, where there are dozens of universities. In June, he signed into law a bill that would allow State University of New York branches and some private schools to offer tax-free zones for new businesses that open on or adjacent to campuses.

Ithaca’s mayor, Svante L. Myrick, who was invited to speak alongside the governor when he promoted the plan in May, playfully challenged other leaders of Ivy League cities in the Northeast to come to his. “And I’ll show you how we built in Ithaca the lowest unemployment rate in the state,” he said, adding that the city had been successful “because our universities have partnered with our private industries,” and did not just rely on businesses selling “sandwiches and beds” to visitors and students…

…Soft-spoken and slyly funny, Mr. Myrick is a striking success story. Living in the tiny town of Earlville, N.Y., he overcame a childhood that included stints living in shelters and sometimes sleeping in a family car. His father struggled with drug abuse, and his mother raised him and his three siblings on minimum-wage jobs, with help from his grandparents.

Mr. Myrick, whose mother is white and whose father is African-American, said he vividly remembers reading about Barack Obama as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Holy moly,’” Mr. Myrick said. “Here’s this guy, he’s mixed race, he’s got a funny name, he’s just like me. And it made me think I could go to a good school. I could do something.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Doing the right thing’: transracial adoption in the USA

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1273-1291
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

Racial/cultural identity and parental cultural competence in transracial adoption (TRA) are subjects of fierce debate and discussion in contemporary western societies. The ongoing practice of TRA has led to a polarization that either supports or berates the suitability of the environment provided in such homes. The external scrutiny invariably creates doubt among white adoptive parents as to whether they are ‘doing the right thing’. By drawing upon extant literature and original qualitative research carried out in New York, this paper explores adoptive mothers’ conceptualization and understanding of racial/ethnic socialisation (RES). The paper puts forward three discursive approaches. It is argued that the ways in which white adoptive mothers understand and experience diversity influences their approach to RES, which in turn is mediated through family and community networks and societal discourses on race, power and hierarchy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Photo of the Week: An Interracial Family in 1962

The Brooklyn Historical Society Blog
The Brooklyn Historical Society
2013-06-05

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History

The Bibuld Family, ca. 1962, V1989.22.14; Bob Adelman photographs of Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrations collection, V1989.002; Brooklyn Historical Society.

This photograph from the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) collection shows the Bibuld family: parents Elaine and Jerome, and their three children Melanie, Carrington, and Douglass (L to R).

The Bibulds, an interracial family, lived in Crown Heights in the early 1960s and the children attended a neighborhood school that had a Gifted and Talented program and enrichments like art, music, and field trips.  After their home caught fire in the fall of 1962, the Bibulds moved to Park Slope, and the children’s new neighborhood school had substandard academics and few enrichments — and the student body was more than 70% African American and Puerto Rican.

Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, both members of the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, were angered by this educational inequity and concerned for their children who were very bored at their new school. So, they pulled their children out of this racially segregated public school and sat them in an all-white school in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. Technically, the children were not enrolled in school and the City considered them truants, which opened the parents up to imprisonment for parental neglect. For roughly three months, the Bibuld protest was the most important desegregation case in the city…

Read the entire article here.

Appo Will Serve Six Months

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Thursday, 1895-10-03
page 12, column 2
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection

George Appo, the Chinese half-bred, who obtained notoriety especially through his testimony before the Lexow senate investigating committee, and who pleaded guilty to assault in the third degree in the stabbing of Policeman Michael J. Rein of the West Thirtieth street station on April 9, was this morning sentenced to six months in the penitentiary by Judge Cowing in Part II, New York general sessions.

The question of course which naturally suggests itself to every right-minded white man and woman, is. Where is this thing to end? Whither are we tending? What is to be done to stop this most unnatural and detestable movement. For it is as plain as a pikestaff that if it continues, there will be soon no whites left in this once great and prosperous country. We shall all be mulattoes, and be afflicted with all the peculiarities both mental and physical of that unhappy race. The signs of this great and terrible change already begin to make themselves manifest in our streets; for the most careless observer who walks down Broadway, can hardly fail to observe the appearance on a vast number of faces of the well-known brownish tinge. Let that tinge once become general, and then “farewell, a long farewell to all our whiteness!”

“What Are We Coming To, and When Shall We Reach It?,” The New York Times, March 26, 1864. http://www.nytimes.com/1864/03/26/news/what-are-we-coming-to-and-when-shall-we-reach-it.html.

What Are We Coming To, and When Shall We Reach It?

The New York Times
1864-03-26

The pressure on our space of other matter has prevented us from recurring to the serious and important topic of “Miscegenation.” We regret very much, however, having allowed our attention to be even temporarily diverted from it, as we find from the earnest discussion which it is receiving at the hands of our cotemporaries, that it has lost none of its importance. In fact, if we are to believe what we hear, especially from the recognized and authoritative organs of the Democratic party, the rage for marrying black people, which has taken possession of the Republican party, is rather on the increase. It is said, we know not with what truth, that the Union League Club has fitted up a night-bell at its door in Union-square, and keeps a black minister on the premises, who marries all couples of different colors at any hour of the day or night. An effort is said to have been made by the leaders of the party to stave off these alliances until after the meeting of the Convention next July, when the campaign would have fairly commenced; but it was all in vain. The radicals have carried everything before them, and, if things go on at their present rate, it is feared that in three months every white man who is not connected by marriage with a colored family, will be “read out” of the party…

…The question of course which naturally suggests itself to every right-minded white man and woman, is. Where is this thing to end? Whither are we tending? What is to be done to stop this most unnatural and detestable movement. For it is as plain as a pikestaff that if it continues, there will be soon no whites left in this once great and prosperous country. We shall all be mulattoes, and be afflicted with all the peculiarities both mental and physical of that unhappy race. The signs of this great and terrible change already begin to make themselves manifest in our streets; for the most careless observer who walks down Broadway, can hardly fail to observe the appearance on a vast number of faces of the well-known brownish tinge. Let that tinge once become general, and then “farewell, a long farewell to all our whiteness!”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Framing and Superstorm Sandy: A Black Mother Begs for Help While Her Children Drown

We Are Respectable Negroes
2012-11-04

Chauncey DeVega

Superstorm Sandy has made the divisions of class in the New York City area very clear. The “haves” are able to muster the resources to somehow survive. The “have nots” are left to their own devices.

Superstorm Sandy has also reminded us of how race remains one of the main dividing lines in our society. While naked displays of racism are now outside of the norms of “polite society,” racial micro-aggressions, the day-to-day moments of white racial hostility and animus towards people of color, continue onward.

Racial micro-aggressions can impact the lives of black and brown folks in ways that are “just” inconvenient–the store detective that follows you around while shopping; being asked for ID when using a credit card; when your friends or colleagues “complement” you by saying you are one of “the special” or “good” ones.

Alternatively, these racial micro-aggressions can also be deadly in their outcomes.

Superstorm Sandy has yet to provide an iconic example of white racist media framing such as when during Hurricane Katrina, black people were described as “looters,” and whites, also trying to survive, were captioned in news photos as “looking for food.”

A lack of an iconic moment does not mean that race no longer impacts life outcomes, the safety and health of people of color, or how white society chooses to view (or not) African-Americans as full members of the polity and broader community…

Some other thoughts and questions about racial framing and SuperStorm Sandy:

1. Has racial framing become more or less prominent in the media’s coverage of Superstorm Sandy? I have noticed a good number of photos where people of color are shown in line waiting for gasoline and food. I have not seen many similar images of white people. In discussions of looting, the only stories I have seen have featured black men. Have any of you seen stories about social disorder following Superstorm Sandy in white communities?

2. The white victims of SuperStorm Sandy in Staten Island, and the Jersey Shore in particular, have been framed by the media as “hearty” stalwarts and survivors. In comparison to Hurricane Katrina, why is their decision to stay put after an evacuation order, not being interrogated as that of “irresponsible” people?…

…7. Glenda Moore’s two children were fathered by a white man. In many ways, the multiracial movement is prefaced on gaining white privilege for those people who are of a “mixed race” background in order to create a buffer race and colored class.

The white parentage through their father of those two beautiful black children did not extend any privilege, or sense of white kinship to them, through their mother. The boundaries of white community were not broad enough to save those two children.

The “one drop” rule is real in American society. For example, while some white folks are confused (and even offended) by Barack Obama’s claim to a black identity, this tragic event is more proof that in this society African Americans of a “mixed race” background are still stigmatized by their blackness. In total, White privilege, and their “white” lineage, did not save Glenda Moore’s two children. It left them to drown and die.

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Brooklyn

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
September 2012

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Intermarriage has been rising in the United States steadily since about 1960. Before 1960 there were so few interracial marriages in the United States that Interraciality was really invisible. Prior to 1960, the idea of marrying someone from another race in the US was so unusual that social pressure, family pressure, and in some states the law made such marriages impossible.

So what explains the rise in interracial marriage?

One answer is that the law changed. In 1967, the US Supreme Court, in a brief but powerful and unanimous decision (Loving v. Virginia), struck down all the state laws that had made interracial marriage illegal. Overnight, Americans had the right to marry anyone from the opposite sex regardless of race. New York, however, was one of the states that had never had laws against interracial marriage. Take a look at this map of US states to see which states had laws against interracial marriage and when.

In the above graph (click to enlarge), you can see that intermarriage had a similar rise in the US, in Brooklyn, and in New York, starting near zero, and peaking at between 5% and 7% of all marriages in 2010. The trajectory of interracial marriage was so similar in Brooklyn and in the US as a whole that the blue US line is hidden underneath the green Brooklyn line in parts of the graph above. Since interracial marriage was always legal in Brooklyn but often illegal in the rest of the US before 1967, something other than the law (which never changed in Brooklyn) must explain the rise of intermarriage.

Even though interracial marriage has risen a great deal, Americans and Brooklynites still have a strong tendency to marry people from their own racial group…

…What explains the rise of Intermarriage?

• The US had a big immigration reform in 1965, which led to a sharp rise in immigration from Asia and Latin America. As the US population became more racially diverse, there was more opportunity for Americans to meet (and fall in love with) people from other races. Immigrant destinations like New York City tend to have more intermarriage as a result of having more racial diversity.
• The age at first marriage has been steadily rising since the 1960s. Age at first marriage in the US is now 27 or 28 years of age. In the past, age of first marriage was typically about 21 years. The later age at first marriage means that young people are more likely to travel away from home before they marry. Travel away from home increases the chances of meeting (and falling in love with) someone who is different from you.
• Attitudes have changed. Interracial marriage is not very controversial for people who were raised in the post- Civil Rights and post- Loving v. Virginia era. As interracial marriage has become more common and more visible, more Americans have gotten used to the idea that interracial couples are part of the panorama of American families. Opposition within families to intermarriage has declined, but has not disappeared…

…In order to figure out how many interracial couples there are, one must first divide people into separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories. In dividing people into mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories, one immediately confronts a series of definition problems that have no unique solution.

The fact is that race exists in America only because we Americans believe in race and invest the categories with meaning…

Read the entire article here.