Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.
Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,” The Saturday Review of Literature, October 11, 1947: 13
Am I Black? Hell yeah! I have light green eyes, when I had hair it was curly and blonde. My complexion is café au lait.
Billy Calloway, “Am I Black? Hell Yeah!,” (1)ne Drop Project, (January 16, 2013). http://1nedrop.com/am-i-black-hell-yeah-by-billy-calloway/
The year 1967 becomes the temporal landmark for the beginning of an interracial nation. That year, the United States Supreme Court ruled state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, these restrictive laws had created a presumption of illegitimacy for historical claims of racial intermixture. Not all states had antimiscegenation laws, but the sting of restriction extended to other states to forge a collective forgetting of mixed race. Defenders of racial purity could depend on these laws to render interracial relationships illegitimate. Looking back to Loving as the official birth of Multiracial America reinforces the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the history of mixed race in America. Even though Loving instigates the open acceptance of interracialism, it unintentionally creates a collective memory that mixed race people and relationships did not exist before 1967…
Kevin Noble Maillard, “The Multiracial Epiphany of Loving.” Fordham Law Review. May 2008, Volume 76, Number 6 pages 2709-2733. http://fordhamlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/pdfs/Vol_76/Maillard_Vol_76_May.pdf.
This book examines two of the most insidious ideas in American history. The first is the belief that interracial marriage is unnatural. The second is the belief in white supremacy. When these two ideas converged, with the invention of the term “miscegenation” in the 1860s, the stage was set for the rise of a social, political, and legal system of white supremacy that reigned through the 1960s and, many would say, beyond.
[Page 1, Paragraph 1]
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2008). 1.
Similarly, the idea that racial identity can be freely chosen appeals to the high value Americans place on individualism. The novelty of a mixed racial identity makes one stand out against dominant modes of identification. At the same time, the elaboration of sense of a multiracial group identity makes one feel as if one belongs to a community where one is, if only in one’s perceived marginality, just like everyone else. The irony here is that while the discourse of choice in racial identification suggests we as individuals are determining for ourselves who we want to be, in fact we are “choosing” within a given set of epistemological, social, and political conditions that make only certain choices possible.
DaCosta, Kimberly McClain, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 179.
Colleges or universities with monoracial cultural centers pose a challenge for biracial and multiracial students. While we know that challenge is an important feature of the student development process, we must still think deeply about the challenges we present through the messages sent by our programs and services. Is this level of challenge harmful or helpful? Are we asking students to choose which part of themselves they are going to identify with during their time at the college or university? Are we asking students to deny a part of themselves in order to identify with another part? Are we allowing biracial students to be their whole selves? How does this current design for the delivery of cultural programs and services help with the students’ identity development? This is a critical period in which students learn about themselves and their identity… What are biracial students learning through monoracial cultural centers, and what are we teaching students about our view of the world?
Larry D. Roper and Kimberly McAloney, “Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?,” Journal of College & Character, Volume 11, Number 4, (2010): 3 pages, doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1743.
The contrast between the multigenerational and first-generation experiences is further underscored by the fact that the latter is frequently viewed as a more legitimate basis for multiracial identity. The reasons for this are related to the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the liberalization of social attitudes on race over the past three decades. Moreover, the first-generation experience originates in the context of interracial marriage and thus includes an element of choice. Marriages confer equal legal status on both parties and, by extension, equal legitimacy on both parents’ identities. The one-drop rule, therefore, has been less consistently enforced, both in theory and in practice, in the case of their offspring. This is particularly true of policies at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and to a lesser extent of the Census Bureau. Before the 1980s, the NCHS ciassified racially blended children in terms of the “minority” parent, while the Census Bureau classified them in terms of the father’s racial or ethnic identity. Since the 1980s both agencies have based the children’s race on the racial identity of the mother. Many multiracial children of European American mothers have therefore been designated as “white” rather than as “biracial.” Since the mid-1960s, however, adoption agencies have tended to describe blended children as “racially mixed” or “biracial” in order to attract white adoptive parents by appealing to their Eurocentric bias.
Such flexibility has not been extended so readily to multi generational individuals. Their experience carries with it the implicit stigma of concubinage, rape, and illegitimacy; and the parents and families of these individuals have typically been seen as African American. Attitudes toward Native Americans and Latinos—two other populations that have experienced significant miscegenation with European Americans—provide a point of contrast. The European American, as well as the Native American and Latino communities, have more openly acknowledged multiple racial and cultural backgrounds in the discourse on identity. In these populations as well, however, the same divisive and pernicious “colorism” that has infected African-descent Americans has arisen, with the result that lighter-skinned and otherwise more European-appearing Latinos and Native Americans are treated preferentially within and outside their communities. Nevertheless, greater openness among these groups to multiracialism has mitigated the generational differences as the primary factor determining the legitimacy of multiracial identity. Multigenerational individuals of European American and African American decent, therefore, find themselves at odds not only with the larger society and the African American community, but often with first-generation individuals as well. Since most African-descent Americans have some European American ancestry in their genealogy but identify themselves as black, blacks often accuse multigenerational individuals of trying to escape the stigma attached to “blackness.” Some first-generation individuals contend that their own biracial experience is the legitimate starting point for a blended identity…
Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 104-105.
Jean Toomer and the History of Passing
Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013
pages 113-121
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016
Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University
Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp.(paper).
In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of “passing” for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. “He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.” Gates then added, “I feel sorry for him.”
This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the “bi-racial” and “mixed-race” movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories—and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph.
“Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women,” wrote Sharon Toomer, the author’s great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, “but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—not interpretation.” She continued: “In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white.” But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.
Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren’t entirely certain what to make of it.
Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinchback—the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the publication of Cane, a questing soul in search of a racial identity outside of contemporary realities, hoping…