Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • “And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

    “And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

    AsianShakespearean ~ Poetic Justifications, Artistic Testimonies…
    2012-04-25

    Rebecca Hu

    Scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing has frequently been approached from the angles of race and queer theories.  H. J. Landry and soon after, Brian Carr, have recently broken ground in their demonstrations of a new synthesized approach to the discourses, taking into account symptomatic readings of homosexual desire as an expression of hooksian feminism and ethnic pride. Nevertheless, by synthesizing, both critical approaches tread dangerously on the delicate lines concerning race and gender: Landry, although meticulously addressing his usage of the term, “mulatto,” in his third footnote, takes the political construction of “race” for granted; his perpetual separation of “black” and “white” as distinct figures even as he rebukes this constructed “blood quantum version of race” undermines the internal, complex “cultural authenticities” which Candice Jenkins just a year before him had striven to demarcate in her analysis of the same novel (46-47). So undermining, Landry problematically critiques that performance of conventional femininity through submission to black men is “embracing inferiority” (25). Carr, in a similar vein, situates paranoid interpretations of passing as “nothing” for “something,” implying consequently that “blackness” and “whiteness” are, in fact, differentiated by absence and existence respectively. Carr’s ironic dichotomy necessitates qualification throughout his assessment of paranoia. He admits repeatedly that concentrated focus on the nothing does, indeed, further paranoia itself. Controversy arises in Carr’s article when he subsequently links paranoia with homosexuality with the “killing desire” which ultimately eliminates Clare Kendry (291) — this time, without sufficient qualification. These racial and gender pitfalls caution us to re-evaluate our current synthesis when speaking of Passing…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

    Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

    HarperCollins
    2005
    240 pages
    Trimsize: 6 x 9
    Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780060761424; ISBN10: 0060761423

    Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem

    Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation’s leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from “mongrelization”). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family’s South Carolina plantation.

    Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew—one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate—and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

    With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before—told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

  • Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

    Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

    The Los Angeles Times
    2013-02-04

    Elaine Woo

    In 2003 the retired L.A. schoolteacher unburdened herself of a secret: Her father was Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a career as a champion of segregation.

    A week before Christmas in 2003, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher stood before a phalanx of news cameras and 250 reporters in a South Carolina ballroom and declared, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
     
    After more than 60 years, Washington-Williams had chosen to unburden herself of a secret: that she, a black woman, had been fathered by a white man — Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a long Washington career as a champion of segregation.
     
    Thurmond had died five months earlier at age 100, having never acknowledged that his liaison with a family maid when he was 22 had produced a daughter. At 78, Washington-Williams decided she owed it to history to speak up.

    “My children ultimately convinced me that history needed to know about Thurmond and that I should set the record straight,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I am not doing this for money. I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
     
    Washington-Williams, 87, died Monday of natural causes in Columbia, S.C., said her attorney, Frank K. Wheaton. After more than 40 years in Los Angeles, she moved back to South Carolina a few years ago when her health began to deteriorate…

    Read the entire obituary here.

  • Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

    Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

    PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association)
    Volume 119, Number 2 (March, 2004)
    pages 282-295

    Brian Carr

    Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) has occasioned a great deal of paranoid interpretation, in large part because the novel is about nothing. I use nothing in the sense of no thing or a non-object, both of which are irreducible to the familiar meaning of nothing as inconsequential or strictly nonexistent.’ In the framework of paranoid interpretation, desire and knowledge imaginarily coincide with an object much that everything, imagined to include nothing, becomes something. Paranoid interpretation is less a property of Passingthan a transactional dynamic between the novel and the critical work on it, a dynamic activated in large part by many critics’ “hateloving” attachment to Passing’scentral character, Irene Redfield. Reading Irene’s interpretations of her life as paranoid delusions, many critics have an inverted and corrective investment in her. As if to resolve yet sustain Irene’s wild interpretations, the contemporary scholarly archive on Passing is virtually unified in its belief that her paranoid apprehensions can be submitted to a proper reading that will furnish the positive knowledge Irene systematically misses.

    Critics are not strictly wrong in their characterization of Irene as, in Deborah E. McDowell’s words, “clearly deluded” (xxvi). And yet, the fact that many critics work to procure for themselves the clarity they need to assign paranoid delusion to Irene leads one to wonder, how “deluded” are the critics? If paranoia, through delusion, converts nothing into something, the bulk of the critical work on Passing is in reach of paranoia, since the work, too, impulsively confounds something with nothing, truth with what at best can be only half told, desire with what Kaja Silvermanaptly calls its “impossible nonobject”(39). Critics often find that Irene’s delusional mentality and Larsen’s manifest text of racial passing and heterosexual jealousy collaborate to occlude a latent homosexuality, which neither Larson nor…

  • Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

    Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

    University of Minnesota Press
    2008
    328 pages
    6 x 9
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5105-4; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5105-1
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5104-7; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5104-3

    Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
    University of California, Irvine

    Questions the ramifications of multiracialism for progressive social change.

    Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiracialism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.

    In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.

    An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: On the Verge of Race
    • 1. Beyond the Event Horizon: The Multiracial Project
    • 2. Scales of Coercion and Consent: Sexual Violence, Antimiscegenation, and the Limits of Multiracial America
    • 3. There Is No (Interracial) Sexual Relationship
    • 4. The Consequence of Race Mixture
    • 5. The True Names of Race: Blackness and Antiblackness in Global Contexts
    • Notes
    • Works Cited
    • Index

  • Racial Medicine: Not So Fast

    Racial Medicine: Not So Fast

    The Daily Beast
    2008-08-19

    Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
    Reuters

    Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that “race is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.” Then duck before you get punched in the face. . . . but as you’re avoiding injury try to hand your would-be assailants a new paper published online this afternoon by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, which concludes that classifying people by the crude category of race—as in, of African, Asian or European ancestry—for medical purposes, as some people want to do, is really, really stupid…

    …Which brings us to the new study. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute got the cool idea of analyzing the genomes of two white guys who, according to the conventional racial categories, belong to the same race. The two are Venter himself and James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Venter led the private effort to sequence the human genome, winding up in a tie with the public project to do the same.

    It happens that the genomes of both men are in the public domain. Watson agreed to have his sequenced and published last year, with Venter right behind. So what do the genomes reveal?

    The two men metabolize drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, antipsychotics and the cancer drug tamoxifen, differently. Venter has two functional copies of the CYP2D6 form of the cytochrome P-450 gene, which metabolizes more than 75 percent of drugs, while Watson has two copies of the more-sluggish variant of the gene. That’s rare for Caucasians (only 3 percent of whites have the sluggish version), but common in East Asians (49 percent of whom have it). Funny, Watson doesn’t look Chinese. But if Watson’s doctor decided to use race-based medicine to predict how he would metabolize drugs, she’d say, well, we have a white guy here, and whites rarely have the sluggish version, so I’ll assume Watson doesn’t have it either. As a result, the drug would stay in Watson’s system longer, with stronger effects compared to someone in whom the drug was quickly metabolized and cleared from the body. “It is unlikely that a doctor would guess that optimal drug dosages might differ for Drs. Watson and Venter,” the scientists write.

    That’s why Venter and colleagues conclude that race is too crude a proxy for what genetic group—ethnicity or, as biologists say, population—someone belongs to. It is imperative to “go beyond simplistic ethnic categorization,” they write, since that can be seriously—and perhaps fatally—misleading. (In the U.S., some 100,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions, many caused by an inability to properly metabolize the medication because of a particular CYP2D6 variation.) “Race/ethnicity should be considered only a makeshift solution for personalized genomics because it is too approximate,” they write…

    Read the entire article here.

  • However, a better approach might be to recognize that the right of the individual to marry is a fundamental right…

    The validity of the antimiscegenation law itself could also be questioned under the fourteenth amendment by requiring the showing of a reasonable legislative purpose for its enactment. There is serious doubt that any valid reason could be shown for this type of statute. In fact, the three basic arguments which are often advanced to support these statutes; namely, that the children of these marriages would be inferior, that social tensions and domestic problems are lessened, and that psychological hardships to the offspring are avoided, have been discredited. Therefore the application of a reasonable legislative purpose test would most likely lead to a finding of unconstitutionality under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, especially since the usual presumption of a valid legislative purpose is not applied to cases dealing with racial classifications.

    However, a better approach might be to recognize that the right of the individual to marry is a fundamental right, protected under the clear and present danger test. Surely it is a right which can be considered as important to the individual as is his right to own property or his freedom of speech. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.

    C. Michael Conter, “Recent Decisions: Constitutional Law: Miscegenation Laws,” Marquette Law Review, Volume 48, Issue 4 (Spring 1965): pages 616-620.

  • as they may possess all of the vicious and sensual traits of the negro, without the color of the latter’s skin as a warning flag to the unwary.

    These half-breed negroes in the United States, or, in fact, all that class of people having any negro blood in them at all, are extremely objectionable factors to add to our nation or risk in the building up of our civilization. They often, indeed in a large proportion of instances, are worse than the typical negroes themselves, and certainly a large number of them are no better. They are dangerous from whatever point man may elect to view them, as they may possess all of the vicious and sensual traits of the negro, without the color of the latter’s skin as a warning flag to the unwary. In any question at issue they will invariably choose sides with the colored race every time, and from their keener wits and higher intelligence are capable of giving a greater amount of trouble. Mulattoes, too, have better opportunities to contract white alliances in marriage, and thus insidiously pass the savage Ethiopian blood into the veins of the Anglo-Saxon or American. This is most deplorable, for, as I have frequently remarked, the negro has absolutely nothing in his organization that can be added to our own with the slightest value, while on the other hand, nearly everything about him, mentally, morally and physically, is undesirable in the highest degree. As has been shown, he is, as a rule, deeply imbued with criminal tendencies, and his hybrids are equally so. Mulattoes have no higher sense of our civilization than the black stock from which they are derived. They are, however, in speech, manners, dress and actions better mimics of the whites than most of the true negroes. Personally, I have found them equally superstitious, treacherous, mendacious, and unreliable. It is the better class of hybrids, however, that command such place and position in this country that demand more than usual ability to fill. Many regard them as the colored doctors, the colored lawyers, colored clergymen, colored poets and authors, and so on, whereas, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the kind. They are hybrids, nothing more nor less, and often with a very minute tincture of the African negro in them. Some of them are so like Caucasians in face and figure, that were they to go abroad, to Europe, for example, the average European would never for an instant suspect the negro blood in them, and it would only be that person well versed in the negro character and with a knowledge gained by long contact with the race, that could make the correct ethnical diagnosis. I refer distinctly to such specimens as Henry Ossawa Tanner (artist), Daniel H. Williams (surgeon), Charles Waddell Chesnutt (novelist), Francis James Grimké (clergyman), and likewise (W. E. Burghardt) Du Bois (sociologist). When the type is more pronounced, there is no mistaking them, as the negro then crops out with greater certainty. This is the case with such examples as Paul Lawrence Dunbar (poet), Kelly Miller (mathematician), Granville T. Woods (electrician), Edward H. Morris (lawyer), Booker T. Washington (teacher), and several others. Negroes claim one and all of these as representatives of their race in America, and a man like Du Bois is continually howling about them one and all in the press as the Advance Guard of the Negro Race in America.

    R. W. Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1907), 91-93.

  • Three Is Not Enough

    Three Is Not Enough

    The Daily Beast
    Newsweek Magazine
    1995-02-12

    Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
    Reuters

    In 1990, Americans claimed membership in nearly 300 races or ethnic groups and 600 American Indian tribes. Hispanics had 70 categories of their own.

    To most Americans race is as plain as the color of the nose on your face. Sure, some light-skinned blacks, in some neighborhoods, are taken for Italians, and some Turks are confused with Argentines. But even in the children of biracial couples, racial ancestry is writ large—in the hue of the skin and the shape of the lips, the size of the brow and the bridge of the nose. It is no harder to trace than it is to judge which basic colors in a box of Crayolas were combined to make tangerine or burnt umber. Even with racial mixing, the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors.

    Or is it? C. Loring Brace has his own ideas about where race resides, and it isn’t in skin color. If our eyes could perceive more than the superficial, we might find race in chromosome 11: there lies the gene for hemoglobin. If you divide humankind by which of two forms of the gene each person has, then equatorial Africans, Italians and Greeks fall into the “sickle-cell race”; Swedes and South Africa’s Xhosas (Nelson Mandela’s ethnic group) are in the healthy-hemoglobin race. Or do you prefer to group people by whether they have epicanthic eye folds, which produce the “Asian” eye? Then the !Kung San (Bushmen) belong with the Japanese and Chinese. Depending on which trait you choose to demarcate races, “you won’t get anything that remotely tracks conventional [race] categories,” says anthropologist Alan Goodman, dean of natural science at Hampshire College.

    The notion of race is under withering attack for political and cultural reasons—not to mention practical ones like what to label the child of a Ghanaian and a Norwegian. But scientists got there first. Their doubts about the conventional racial categories—black, white, Asian—have nothing to do with a sappy “we are all the same” ideology. Just the reverse. “Human variation is very, very real,” says Goodman. “But race, as a way of organizing [what we know about that variation], is incredibly simplified and bastardized.” Worse, it does not come close to explaining the astounding diversity of humankind—not its origins, not its extent, not its meaning. “There is no organizing principle by which you could put 5 billion people into so few categories in a way that would tell you anything important about humankind’s diversity,” says Michigan’s Brace, who will lay out the case against race at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. About 70 percent of cultural anthropologists, and half of physical anthropologists, reject race as a biological category, according to a 1989 survey by Central Michigan University anthropologist Leonard Lieberman and colleagues. The truths of science are not decided by majority vote, of course. Empirical evidence, woven into a theoretical whole, is what matters. The threads of the argument against the standard racial categories:…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy

    The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy

    SAGE Publications
    2009-06-30
    168 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 9781412975063
    Hardcover ISBN: 9781412975056

    Bonnie M. Davis

    What does it mean to be “in between”?

    As more biracial and multiracial students enter the classroom, educators have begun to critically examine the concept of race. Through compelling student and teacher narratives, best-selling author Bonnie M. Davis gives voice to a frequently mislabeled and misunderstood segment of the population. Filled with research-based instructional strategies and reflective questions, the book supports readers in examining:

    • The meaning of race, difference, and ethnicity
    • How mixed-identity students develop racial identities
    • How to adjust instruction to demonstrate cultural proficiency
    • Complex questions to help deepen understanding of bi- and multiracial experiences, white privilege, and the history of race in the U.S.

    This sensitively written yet practical guide fills a gap in the professional literature by examining the experiences of biracial/multiracial students in the context of today’s classrooms. The author calls upon readers to take a transformational journey toward racial literacy and, ultimately, become empowered by a real understanding of what it means to be biracial or multiracial and enable all students to experience increased self-confidence and believe in their ability to succeed.

    Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • About the Author
    • Prologue
    • 1. Beginning the Journey
    • 2. What Is Race?
    • 3. What Are You?
    • 4. What Are the Challenges for Multiracial Students?
    • 5. How Mixed Identity Students Develop Racial Identities
    • 6. Outside the School Walls
    • 7. The Impact of Skin Color
    • 8. Listening to Parents
    • 9. Taking It All to the Classroom: Culturally Proficient Instruction
    • 10. Future Voices
    • 11. The Journey’s End
    • References
    • Index