Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Book Review)

    Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Book Review)

    Civil War Book Review
    Louisiana State University Special Collections

    Kelly Kennington, 2009-2010 Law & Society Postdoctoral Fellow
    Institute for Legal Studies
    University of Wisconsin Law School

    Jones, Bernie D. Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South, University of Georgia Press. 216 pages. 2009.

    Fathers of Conscience, Bernie D. Jones, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, examines southern state appellate court decisions concerning the wills of white slaveholders who left property to their mixed-race children. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, white slaveholders often engaged in sexual relationships with enslaved women. Southern communities typically accepted this behavior, as long as it remained hidden. But problems arose when white men chose to recognize the children of interracial unions and grant them freedom and property, particularly when these grants came at the expense of white relatives. In the latest contribution to the Studies in the Legal History of the South series, Jones argues that contests over wills forced southern judges to weigh the right of white slaveholders to dispose of their property as they wished against community concerns about the growing free black population and the threat it posed to the institution of slavery.

    The first two chapters of Fathers of Conscience describe the types of cases that resulted throughout the antebellum South when potential white heirs challenged the validity of a slaveholder’s will, focusing especially on the language southern jurists used in their decisions. The first chapter argues that judges had “a limited set of tropes from which to choose” in deciding cases involving mixed-race inheritance, so they primarily described white testators in three ways: as “righteous fathers” who took responsibility for their mixed-race children; as “vulnerable old men” who were under the control of their enslaved black sexual partners; and as “degraded creatures” who garnered the disgust of southern jurists (42). In the second chapter, Jones describes judges whose language focused not on categorizing white men but on the consequences of these wills for southern society. Judges in these instances rebuffed white men’s efforts to free their enslaved children because jurists recognized the dangers of expanding the population of free people of color. In doing so, Jones argues that judges were “hiding behind the formal laws of slavery” when they cited statutes to deny the validity of wills (57)…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

    Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

    Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
    Volume 64, Number 4, Winter 2008
    E-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610
    DOI: 10.1353/arq.0.0025

    Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
    Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

    Even though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that by 1915 the one-drop rule had been accepted by both blacks and whites in the North and South (109). Hence, mixed bloods with visible traces of blackness, including members of the former mulatto elite, would be judged as black by both blacks and whites. At best, they could be “in some way, satisfyingly black”. In this article, I put forward a reading of Toomer and Cane that explains his fascination with miscegenation in terms of his hope for what was possible in America. Specifically, his unique and solitary position vis-à-vis the New Negro in Black Washington and the Young American in White Manhattan provided him with the reasons, models, and ideals to believe that, in Cane, he could effectively voice and sketch out a mixed race sensibility and community that would be grasped and appreciated by the American public. However, in the process of writing Cane, he came face to face with the rigid categories and limits of the black-white color line in the Jim Crow era, which rendered unintelligible and unsustainable in the culture at large the mixed race sensibility and community he sought to express and develop. In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s Young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Tiger Woods Is Not the End of History: or, Why Sex across the Color Line Won’t Save Us All

    Tiger Woods Is Not the End of History: or, Why Sex across the Color Line Won’t Save Us All

    The American Historical Review
    Volume 108, Number 5
    December 2003

    Henry Yu, Professor of History
    University of California, Los Angeles

    In December 1996, several months after Tiger Woods left Stanford University to become a professional golfer, a Sports Illustrated story entitled “The Chosen One” quoted Tiger’s father, Earl, claiming that his son was “qualified through his ethnicity” to “do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.” Tiger’s mother, Kultida, agreed, asserting that, because Tiger had “Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood,” he could “hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child.” The story’s author concluded that, “when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow … hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face; that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Woods’ face.” Building on the interest in Tiger Woods, stories about mixed-race children and intermarriage proliferated. In January 2000, both Newsweek and Time opened the millennium with cover art speculating on the multi-racial faces of America’s future. 

    The celebration of Tiger Woods’ mixed descent and his widespread popularity would seem to support David Hollinger‘s argument that the history of the United States has been a successful (albeit episodic) history of “amalgamation” overcoming group differences. With Woods as a prominent example, we might even be “crazy enough to believe” the idea that eventually “racism can be ended by wholesale intermarriage,” as Hollinger hints in his concluding paragraph.  However, I would argue that focusing on “intermarriage” and “race-mixing” should bring us to a different conclusion about U.S. history, and Woods might serve as a useful prism for separating out some other important aspects of the encounter of the United States with Asia and the Pacific…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Meet the New Faculty: Jennifer Brody

    Meet the New Faculty: Jennifer Brody

    Duke Today
    The Duke Community’s Daily News and Information Resource
    Duke University
    2008-10-22

    Andrea Fereshteh

    Exploring the intersection of race, gender and art

    Durham, North Carolina — From a very early age, Jennifer Brody was curious about the intersection of art, gender and race. She recalls a time as a young girl when she drew a picture of herself and colored her skin in brown.

    “I told my mother that was the color I really was, even though she couldn’t see it,” says the fair-skinned Brody, the newest member of Duke’s African and African American Studies department. “As a young child, I had a conscious perception of how I might move through the world and what kinds of limitations and possibilities my specific location might engender.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Fort Red Border

    Fort Red Border

    Sarabande Books
    2009-08-01
    88 pages
    Trim: 9 x 6
    Paper ISBN: 978-1-932511-74-1

    Kiki Petrosino, Professor of Poetry
    University of Virginia

    Kiki Petrosino has audacity to spare. She devotes the entire first section of her debut collection of poems to a putative affair the speaker is conducting with an imaginary Robert Redford. In the poems, Redford is solicitous of the speaker, as well as curious about her “difference,” probing her about the various meanings of “natural” when applied to her African-American hair. The poems’ hilarity and poignancy issue from the speaker’s distance from, and yearning toward, the center of mainstream culture. Redford serves as ideal partner, the embodiment of American masculinity––but there is also an odd tenderness and actuality to the relationship. In these poems Petrosino is fearless, proceeding from the recognizable terrain of daily life’s emotions rather than seeking refuge in the cool of mere obscurity. Petrosino’s poems scout a new path, one that discovers a believably fierce, vivid, feeling self.

    YOU HAVE MADE A CAREER OF NOT LISTENING

    God has spider skin and lives in secret trees. I have stood beside you, saying this, as you reach into the cupboard for another stack of dry noodles. You eat them with the dead still on, with the sticky deadness still on, because you always throw out the foil package of seasoning. So the noodle brick just loosens, slowly, in a flat brine of city water, just squats and spreads in the center of the frying pan like a washed-up boxer or a stranger’s face disappearing into morphine. After the fight the boxer wraps a towel around his hips and walks into his manager’s office. Some boys wipe fifty bucks’ worth of sweat from the ring, then head to the all-night diner smelling like stacks of thumbs. Meanwhile, dollars bills are blooming in the stranger’s lonely raincoat pocket. It is 5:00 a.m. There are places you will never go with me, no matter how many times you ask, or how hard you eat.

  • “Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear…

    “Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear — people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the 14 million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is ‘passing’ — the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites…  Often these emigrants achieve success in business, the professions, the arts and sciences. Many of them have married white people…  Sometimes they tell their husbands or wives of their Negro blood, sometimes not…”

    “Races: Passing (Inteview with Walter White).” TIME Magazine, October 10, 1947.

  • The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

    The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

    The Black Scholar
    Journal of Black Studies and Research
    Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
    Volume 39, No. 3/4

    Guest Editors:

    Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
    University of Washington

    Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
    University of Washington

    Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
    University of Washington

    Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

    Table of Contents

  • Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era

    Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era

    Univerisity of Illinois Press
    October 2003
    256 pages
    Dimensions: 6 x 9 in. 
    Illustrations: 11 Line Drawings, 11 Tables
    Paper ISBN: 978-1-929011-26-1

    Edited by:

    Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology
    Univeristy of Illinois, Chicago

    Verna M. Keith, Professor of Socilology
    Florida State University

    Hayward Derrick Horton, Professor of Sociology
    State University of New York, Albany

    A collection of essays questioning the truth of American’s color-blind society from outside and inside communities of color.

    Shattering the myth of the color-blind society, the essays in Skin Deep examine skin tone stratification in America, which affects relations not only among different races and ethnic groups but also among members of individual ethnicities. Written by some of the nation’s leading thinkers on race and colorism, these essays ask whether skin tone differentiation is imposed upon communities of color from the outside or is an internally-driven process aided and abetted by community members themselves. They also question whether the stratification process is the same for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Skin Deep addresses such issues as the relationship between skin tone and self esteem, marital patterns, interracial relationships, socioeconomic attainment, and family racial identity and composition. The essays also grapple with emerging issues such as biracialism, color-blind racism, and 21st century notions of race.

  • History 270: Topics In American History – Mixed Race Identity in American Culture

    History 270: Topics In American History – Mixed Race Identity in American Culture

    Spring 2010

    Greg Carter, Assistant Professor of History
    University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

    Through most of the United States’ history, laws have been in place to prevent interracial intimacy and the production of mixed-race offspring, and the Tragic Mulatto figure, victim of confusion and isolation, has remained in the popular imaginary since the nineteenth century, reappearing in novels, movies, and even social science writing that addresses the challenges of multicultural societies. At the same time, writers have equated American identity with the creation of new, hybrid men since Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked “What then is the American, this new man?” in 1782. While less prevalent than ideas that disparage racial mixing, fascination with it has always gone hand in hand with ideas of citizenship, American identity, and progress. Why has there been a combination of appeal with mixed-race Americans along with an antipathy towards them as “half-breeds,” “intermediary,” or marginal”? Have stereotypes of them altered through the past two hundred years? Do they reflect how mixed-race people identify themselves? Lastly, how have these issues changed in the decades since the Supreme Court invalidated anti-miscegenation laws in 1967? This course aims to answer these questions through a variety of interdisciplinary sources. We will be reading fiction, essays, newspaper articles, and texts from the behavioral and social sciences that address a number of topics, including: the one-drop rule, abolition, assimilation, racial passing, the proposed “Multiracial” category for the Census, and representations in popular culture…

    Read the entire syllabus here.

  • The Amerasian Problem: Blood, Duty, and Race

    The Amerasian Problem: Blood, Duty, and Race

    International Relations
    Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2007)
    pages 86-102
    DOI: 10.1177/0047117807073769

    Sue-Je Lee Gage, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
    Ithaca University

    The concept of ‘mixed blood’ is not a new one; however, it was not until 1982 that an unprecedented policy entitled ‘The Amerasian Act’ was created by the US government. Focusing on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and the US, this article will unpack the assumptions underlying the seemingly religious statement ‘the American thing to do’ in terms of US policy, where ostensibly scientific notions of ‘race’, blood and identity are employed.

    Read or purchase the article here.