Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The extent to which elite universities like Columbia worked to keep black students outside their walls makes the accomplishments of Columbia’s hailed “first” black graduates even more impressive, as these students existed within institutions that found identity through racialized exclusivity. That being said, James Parker Barnett’s story highlights a problem with these narratives of “firsts”, not only within Columbia University, but at historically white institutions across the United States. As mentioned above, Columbia’s refusal to admit black students into the University created the conditions that encouraged black students to pass as white, and James Parker Barnett may be a case of just that. However, the only reason we know about James Parker Barnett was because he was caught. There were high levels of racial mixing occurring in the United States through the 1850s when Barnett was expelled from P&S [School of Physicians and Scientists], and estimates about the frequency of racial passing are contentious. Walter White, a famous fair-skinned black man who passed as white while doing investigative work for the NAACP, estimated that “approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear” into white society every year”.⁵² Roi Ottley, a famous African-American journalist in the early 1900s, claimed that there were approximately five million white-passing black people with forty to fifty thousand passing into whiteness every year.⁵³ While these men lived in the early to mid-1900’s, well past Barnett’s time, their research proves that racial passing had become increasingly common as African descendants continued to mix with those of white ancestry. I argue that this information lends itself to the idea that it was highly unlikely that Barnett, if indeed passing, was the first nor the last black individual to pass as white at Columbia University before it officially began accepting black students. How then, can the university endeavor to honor the “first black” students at Columbia if it has no way of knowing the identities of black passers who, by racial standards of the time, were the first graduating students of African “blood”?

Ciara Keane, “Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at Columbia University,” Columbia University and Slavery, 2018. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/blurring-lines-james-parker-barnett-racial-passing-and-invisible-early-black-students.

Crossed Paths: Chicago’s Jacksons and Obamas

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-02-25 19:10Z by Steven

Crossed Paths: Chicago’s Jacksons and Obamas

The New York Times
2013-02-24

Jodi Kantor and Monica Davey

When Barack and Michelle Obama were married in Chicago two decades ago, Santita Jackson, a daughter of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, sang at their wedding. When Mr. Obama ran for his first national office, he made sure he was not stepping on the ambitions of her brother, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who later became a co-chairman of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Now the younger Mr. Jackson, 47, who served 17 years as a congressman representing his hometown, is most likely headed to prison for campaign fraud, trailed by a string of problems from an extramarital affair to mental illness. Although the fates of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Obama could not be more different, their stories, and those of their families, are bound together. The rise of the current leading black political family in the United States is inextricable from the unraveling of an older one, with the two tangled in shifting alliances, sudden reversals of fortune and splits.

Decades ago in Chicago, Mr. Jackson was seen as a far more promising figure than his friend Mr. Obama — one the heir to a legend, the other an outsider seeking to surpass the father he barely knew. If Mr. Jackson had decided to run for the United States Senate in 2004, Mr. Obama most likely would not be president. That year and again in 2008, Mr. Obama, seeking to bolster his credibility with African-Americans, enlisted the younger Mr. Jackson for crucial help…

…Since becoming president, Mr. Obama has had dwindling contact with the Jacksons. The son was under investigation and the father was persona non grata, absent from civil rights meetings Mr. Obama has held, according to participants, despite the role Mr. Jackson played in the movement and in helping to clear the way for a black man to become president…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Jesse L. Jackson, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Jodi Kantor, Monica Davey, New York Times, The New York Times

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Crossed Paths: Chicago’s Jacksons and Obamas

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