Mixed Race Studies

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
by Kathryn Talalay
Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

…Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

Read the entire book review here.

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America

University of Nebraska Press
2002
396 pages
Illus., map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6194-5

Edited by

James F. Brooks, President and Chief Executive Officer
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Confounding the Color Line is an essential, interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad relationships forged for centuries between Indians and Blacks in North America. Since the days of slavery, the lives and destinies of Indians and Blacks have been entwined-thrown together through circumstance, institutional design, or personal choice. Cultural sharing and intermarriage have resulted in complex identities for some members of Indian and Black communities today.

The contributors to this volume examine the origins, history, various manifestations, and long-term consequences of the different connections that have been established between Indians and Blacks. Stimulating examples of a range of relations are offered, including the challenges faced by Cherokee freedmen, the lives of Afro-Indian whalers in New England, and the ways in which Indians and Africans interacted in Spanish colonial New Mexico. Special attention is given to slavery and its continuing legacy, both in the Old South and in Indian Territory. The intricate nature of modern Indian-Black relations is showcased through discussions of the ties between Black athletes and Indian mascots, the complex identities of Indians in southern New England, the problem of Indian identity within the African American community, and the way in which today’s Lumbee Indians have creatively engaged with African American church music.

At once informative and provocative, Confounding the Color Line sheds valuable light on a pivotal and not well understood relationship between these communities of color, which together and separately have affected, sometimes profoundly, the course of American history.

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Health and Behavior Risks of Adolescents with Mixed-Race Identity

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 93, Number 11 (November 2003)
Pages 1865-1870

J. Richard Udry, PhD, Kenan Professor of Maternal and Child Health and Sociology
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Rose Maria Li, PhD
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Janet Hendrickson-Smith, MA
Analytical Sciences, Inc.

Objectives. This study compared the health and risk status of adolescents who identify with 1 race with those identifying with more than 1 race.

Methods. Data are derived from self-reports of race, using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which provides a large representative national sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Respondents could report more than 1 race.

Results. Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables.

Conclusions. Adolescents who self-identify as more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks. The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress.

Read the entire article here.

“We Have Always Been:” Mixed Race Experiences in the USA and French Polynesian (Tahitian) Contexts: 2010 Exploration Seminar in Tahiti

University of Washington Exploration Seminars
Dates of Instruction: 2010-08-22 through 2010-09-10

Program Director: Steve Woodard and Alejandro Espania (Minority Affairs)

Ia Ora Na, friend!  Please know that this three (3) week seminar will take place in Tahiti, one of 130 main islands within the French Polynesian archipelago.   The dates for this seminar are August 22, 2010 through September 10, 2010. Participants should plan to participate in a pre-seminar, which will take place during the latter part of Spring Quarter 2010 at the University of Washington.

We invite you to join us as we traverse through, and push upon the boundaries of, the system of knowledge collectively referred to in the literature as multiracial theory.  Our expected resources include seminal and newly published texts about the mixed race experience, as well as the participants’ (and instructors’) own respective personal narratives.  Both ways of knowing will be routinely explored via purposeful dialogues, structured self-reflections, and organized large/small group and one-on-one community interactions…

For more information, click here.

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10, 08:30-10:30 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom D (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

Chair:
Eileen Boris, Professor of History, Chair and Professor of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Commentator:
Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair and Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Sponsored by the AHA Working Group for Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

Panel Discussion
Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
Queens College, City University of New York

For the past several decades, historians have argued effectively that far from being stable and unchanging until the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, marriage–as a legal and social institution–has changed in significant ways over the course of American history.  Pascoe’s book reminds us that race must necessarily be integrated into this discourse, contending not only that who has had access to marriage has varied but also that the state has played a crucial role in the creation of marital “norms.”

Panel Discussion
Matt J. Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

Panel Discussion
Valerie Matsumoto, Associate Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Peggy Pascoe‘s landmark work raises questions regarding post-World War II changes not only in the dominant US society but also within East Asian American communities, which had their own strong preferences for endogamous marriage.  Her research also draws attention to the roles played by Asian Americans in confronting old racial structures, as embedded in law.  Challenges to miscegenation laws in the US West were mounted by Nisei such as Noriko Sawada Bridges and Harry Oyama during the critical period of Japanese American community reconfiguration and rebuilding after World War II. I will consider how the Japanese American community’s understandings of racialization shifted in this era; I will also examine perceptions of interracial marriage within the ethnic community.

Panel Discussion
Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

I suggest that the implications of Peggy Pascoe‘s work on miscegenation laws stretch beyond the geographical setting of the West, and the temporal setting of the Progressive era, and signal key points of inquiry among scholars of African American Women’s history writ large. In particular, I focus on laws of slavery and manumission in 18th and 19th centuries.  Laws governing manumission held particular ramifications for enslaved African American women as they used their consensual and non-consensual relationships with owners, and consensual relationships with free black men to access freedom for themselves and their children.  I suggest that laws governing manumission served as precursors to miscegenation laws in the 20th century. Likewise, I suggest that “marriage” and uplift constituted a range of definitions based on the particular angle of vision of African American women in both slavery and in freedom.

Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:40 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

Chinese men arrived in Mexico after Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Chinese concentrated in the north due to its proximity to the United States and opportunities in the developing economy. Chinese men forged a variety of ties with Mexicans including romantic liaisons with Mexican women. Anti-Chinese campaigns emerged in the border state Sonora during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Spreading rapidly and gaining tremendous power, the movement reached its zenith during the Great Depression when the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Overlapping partially with Mexican “repatriation,” a mass expulsion of Chinese occurred in Sonora and its southern neighbor Sinaloa. Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children accompanied Chinese men for a variety of reasons. Some Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families departed Sonora and Sinaloa through Mexican ports. Others traversed the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, landing in the custody of U.S. Immigration Service agents who, in enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, jailed and deported them to China. Complicating international relations, the United States accused officials in Sonora of violating its immigration laws by forcing Chinese across its border. Mexican Chinese families faced great challenges in their new locations in Guangdong province. While some families remained unified, others broke apart. The Mexican Chinese families, congregated in Portuguese Macau. The colony’s Catholic and Iberian culture was similar to Mexico’s and the Mexican Chinese found niches. Over time, they created a coherent enclave whose web extended to British Hong Kong as well as Guangdong. The concept of the “Mexican homeland” gained increasing salience in the context of great flux in mid-twentieth-century China. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” over time and from abroad as they struggled to return to Mexico. Following these families across borders and oceans, this paper examines larger questions of nationalism and “diasporas.”

“El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage as Reflected in Poetry, Cartoon, Comedy, and Corridos

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:20 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor, Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Drawing from poetry, cartoons, comedy, and musical recordings of the UCLA Frontera Collection, this paper examines the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage through the lense of Mexican popular culture of the early twentieth century. Popular Mexican culture portrayed Chinese cross-cultural marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as sub-human, degenerative, and unworthy of full inclusion within the Mexican national community. Interracial marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shameless short cut by which slothful Mexican women avoided the need to work and secured lives of material comfort. Such popular criticism of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, moreover, was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism. Beyond presenting an historical examination of the phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, as one important theoretical implication, this paper destabilizes prevalent notions of “mestizaje” within the disciplines of Latin American Studies and Latino Studies. It challenges the “white-brown” binary of traditional racial theory in Latino Studies and sounds a clarion call for further research and discussion related to the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked ethnic immigrant groups to the Mexican and cultural melting pot.

Status, Race, and Marriage: French Continental Law versus French Colonial Law

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 14:30 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Valérie Gobert-Sega
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

In its most traditional moral and legal conception, marriage had for consequence to erase the crime of cohabitation and dissoluteness. Independentently of geographic space and by virtue of the principle of the unity of French laws and customs, the institution of marriage could not be left supplant under colonial law and order. In 1685, the Edict administering the rights and the duties of slaves and emancipated slaves as well as their relationships with white people in the French colonies established legitimacy and religious rules. However, the rigidity of statutory tripartition of the population could not concretely integrate these justifiable, legally valid but socially prohibited unions. The first legal ban was introduced into the Code of Louisiana in 1724 and the second was imposed by the prescription of April, 1778 for continental France. Meanwhile, the Monarchy was never resolved to reform article 9 of the Code of 1685. In doing so, the administration strategically restricted the civil and professional rights of those who chose to go against the social misalliance. It isn’t until the promulgation of the Civil code of 1805 that the restriction based on race and status is finally unified. But once again even if the principle is acquired, its execution remains unpredictable: it extends to all people, of color or black, in colonies but only to black people in metropolitan France. However, for more than two centuries, the legislator, conscientiously maintained a flaw in the prohibition: whether it be in the colonies or in France, these marriages will never be punished by nullity. This absence of penalty will finally allow the Supreme Court and the Abolitionists to declare the legal ban on interracial marriages invalid and to overrule it.