Mixed Race Studies

Seeking Participants for Studies on Stereotyping and Romantic Partner Choices

University of Massachusetts, Lowell
2019-11-03

Rianna M. Grissom, Ph.D. Candidate and Research Assistant
Applied Psychology and Prevention Science Program

Hello! I’m a researcher recruiting people for two different studies on intergroup relations. Study 1 examines modern racial stereotypes in the United States and Study 2 investigates personal and societal factors that influence our romantic choices.

Participating in both studies will take approximately 30 minutes, but is not required. You have the option of completing one study of your choice as well.

Anyone 18 years or older who is living in the U.S. can participate, regardless of race or relationship status. There is no compensation for participating in these studies. However, your contribution will help us better understand current race relations in the U.S., which includes the growing multiracial population.

To participate in the surveys, click here.

P.S. We are especially in need of more male and racial minority participants. Please consider sharing the link with your networks!

The (Dis)Ability of Color; or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding of 19th and 20th Century Passing Narratives

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2015

Julia S. Charles, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the failure of America to acknowledge its wrongdoings against people of color. While this project surveys passing narratives collectively, it pays careful consideration to those novelists whose presentations of the mixed-race figure challenge previously conceived notions of the “tragic mulatto” figure. I investigate how the writers each illuminate elements of the history of slavery and its aftermath in order to remark on black disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, I argue for the importance of the mixed-race figure as a potent symbol for imagined resolution between the larger narrative of American freedom and enslavement of blacks in the United States.

I examine several works of African American racial passing literature: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. It explores the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), tells the true story of the mixed-race Ellen Craft and her husband who escaped to freedom through various racial performances. Nella Larsen sets her novella Passing (1929) in Harlem in the 1920s. The story centers on two childhood friends reunited, but each dealing with their mixed-race ancestry in different ways. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “A Matter of Principle” (1900). endeavors to depict a better class of blacks through her examination of the fair-skinned bourgeois-striver Angela Murray. Each of these stories address American legacies of racism and representation beginning with the Civil War.

I investigate how these authors use the mixed-race figure (mostly) following the Civil War to mark the continuing impact that its legacy has had on black Americans through the New Negro Harlem Renaissance, but also to gesture to the mythic moment of freedom symbolized by successfully crossing the so-called color line. In addition to cataloguing an era of migration, the African American passing narrative represents the moment in which we shift from only seeing characters in terms of monoracial identities. These writers suggest that new performative modes of racial affiliation are necessary to achieve freedom. Reminding us that characters of mixed status practiced race in ways that enabled them to build shared identity despite an often disparate cultural heritage, these works suggest that identities like blackness are always constituted through performance. I argue that racial passing facilitated the “performance” of whiteness together with, an acknowledgment of what is accepted as blackness.

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Creating the Ideal Mexican: 20th and 21st Century Racial and National Identity Discourses in Oaxaca

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 2015
235 pages

Savannah N. Carroll

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities and incorporate sectors of the population into the national framework that had been excluded prior to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. While these efforts were predominantly implemented in indigenous communities located in the northern part of Oaxaca, observations from cultural missionaries related to social and educational conditions reveal ongoing disparities between what it means to be indigenous versus mestizo. The exclusion of moreno, or Afro-descended people from this state sponsored initiative indicates that blackness along with indigenity is otherized, with the primary difference being that Afro-descended Mexicans lack visibility.

To gain a better perspective of the historical and present significance of blackness, my project moves from the general to the specific to include José Maria Morelos, Oaxaca, an Afro-descended community that is isolated, has no tourist attractions or services, dirt roads, and little access to socioeconomic resources. Morelos was established by blacks who escaped slavery and lived independently in their own community. People in the town strongly identify with this history and its relation to their present condition. After speaking with local activists, it became apparent that rights that were supposed to be gained from the Mexican Revolution, such as land rights and public education, did not happen in Morelos, which adversely affects people’s prospects for socioeconomic advancement.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Here, There, and In Between: Travel as Metaphor in Mixed Race Narratives of the Harlem Renaissance

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2014-05-09

Colin Enriquez
English Department

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of mixed race characters in Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on train, automobile, and boat travel, the study analyzes the relationship between the character, transportation, and technology whereby the notion of race is questioned. Furthermore, the dissertation divides travel into departure, interstitial, and arrival phases. With the ability to extend perception and experience, media is also interpreted here as transportation. Using figurative and literal travel, the selected narratives move between localities to allegorize 20th mixed race subjectivity. Socially ambiguous and anonymous, interstitial moments suspend the normative performance of race and enable the selected authors’ investigations of race binarism. After the introduction establishes a theoretical frame composed of transnational and migration studies methods, the ensuing chapters demonstrate the interpretive function of travel in Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Walter White’s Flight. This reading is aided by the connection between modernism and mixed race identity as expounded upon in the works of Robert E. Park, Mark Whalan, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Jeanne Scheper. However, it differs from these in its assertion of travel as an interpretive mode for mixed race literature as a tradition.

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Liminality in the works: The novels of Charles Chesnutt

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 1996
154 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9709591
ISBN: 9780591169812

Susan Jane Doyle

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt’s work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt’s own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels.

I draw on Victor Turner’s definition of liminality, which comes from Turner’s rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt’s characters frequently attain liminal status in his work—they take on the “betwixt and between” characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt’s characters end up as marginals—Turner’s term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19th century in America.

Chesnutt’s novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel. The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. CLOTHING THE EMPEROR: THE ABSENCE OF TEXT IN “BAXTER’S PROCRUSTES“
• 3. FINDING THE COST OF FREEDOM: THE LIMTNAL QUALITY OF PASSING IN THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
• 4. LOST IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS: THE RACIAL SPACES IN THE MARROW OF TRADITION
• 5. PAST THE RUBICON: THE MERE ABSTRACTIONS OF THE COLONEL’S DREAM
• 6. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

Understanding Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Cognition among Multiracial Youth: A Mixed Methods Study

University of Massachusetts, Boston
June 2013

Susan A. Lambe Sarinana

According to the 2010 census report, 9 million people (2.9% of the total population in the United States) identified as multiracial. Of the individuals who identified (or whose parents/guardians identified them) as multiracial, 4.2 million were younger than 18 years of age (www.uscensus.gov). Given that social scientists predict that the multiracial population is increasing so that up to one in five people might identify as multiracial by 2050 (Lee & Bean, 2004), it is critical that researchers examine various aspects of multiracial experiences, including the ways that multiracial youth understand complex concepts such as race, ethnicity, and culture.

This two-part study addresses the gap in literature on intergenerational ethnic-racial socialization processes within interracial families and ethnic cognition among multiracial adolescents. In Study 1, monoracial parents of multiracial children (ages 2-22) completed a survey about ethnic-racial socialization practices, colorblind attitudes, ethnic identity, parent psychological distress, and child psychosocial functioning, and demographic characteristics. Parental ethnic racial socialization beliefs and practices were related to ethnic identity, colorblind attitudes, and parents’ received socialization. In Study 2, multiracial 7th through 12th grade students completed a survey about their perceptions of parental ethnic-racial socialization, ethnic identity, psychosocial functioning, and demographic characteristics. In addition, multiracial adolescents participated in a semi-structured interview to assess Ethnic Perspective Taking Abilities (EPTA; Quintana, 1994). Results support the use of the EPTA model with multiracial youth to assess their understandings of race, ethnicity, and inter-group relations.

Download the entire dissertation here on 2015-06-01.

Ben-Ur awarded study grant by Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

In the Loop: News for Staff and Faculty
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2012-12-13

Associate professor Aviva Ben-Ur of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies has been awarded a Senior Grant in History from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for her book project “Eurafrican Identity in a Jewish Society: Suriname, 1660-1863.”
 
Ben-Ur’s book project focuses on slave society in the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Jews of Iberian origin were among the earliest colonists. She examines the ever-shifting boundaries and bridges of Jewish communal belonging in Suriname and focuses on the special role enslaved and free Eurafrican women played in expanding the definition of Jewishness and collapsing the social hierarchies that distinguished whites from non-whites. Ben-Ur argues that from the start of Jewish settlement in the colony in the 1650s, females of African descent were key to both Jewish community building and the transformative adaptation of Jewish culture to a multi-ethnic slave society…

Read the entire article here.

Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 2008
194 pages

Sandra W. Perot

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History

Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible reconstructions of the Molly Welsh story. My project thus sheds light on the woman Molly Welsh was, how her story was constructed, what factors contributed to the retelling of her story, and why and at what point various narratives deviate from each other. By comparing the various Molly Welsh/Benjamin Banneker narratives it is possible to uncover or at least posit the most reliable narrative, while at the same time coming to a greater understanding of how such historically undocumented stories are constructed and what part memory plays in their reconstruction. An extensive bias informs many of these narratives, shaped by the various “memories” generated by family loyalty, by the growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, by Reconstruction, and by new standards in historical accuracy that appeared with the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.
 
While Molly Welsh may appear to be a near-silent character in her grandson Benjamin Banneker’s story, it is possible that new discoveries will be made that further verify (or refute) the long-standing tradition that Molly Welsh was a white English dairymaid transported to Maryland and that she married one of her own slaves by whom she had four daughters. Recent interest in new ways of approaching history, a greater acceptance of oral traditions as an important historical source, and a renewed appreciation for exploring stories of the untold masses, including women and minorities, may someday locate Molly’s voice and allow her to speak for herself. The chances of uncovering Molly Welsh’s story through documentary sources has improved with the recent emergence of powerful databases and electronic search tools have made many things possible that once were not (ancestry.com, the Old Bailey records for example). And then, perhaps Molly might come to represent other seventeenth-century women who married or had children with African men, like Eleanor Atkins who had a “Molattoe” child and who subsequently received twenty-four lashes for her crime, Elizabeth Day who admitted before the court that she had an illegitimate “Malatto” child by a “Negro man named Quasey belonging to her master,” or Eleanor Price who pleaded guilty to “Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter Belonging to Mr. John Walker,” received twenty-one lashes, and whose child, Jeremiah, was bound out until the age of twenty-one. Through their stories we might come to accept that one of the few choices these women had may have been with whom they had a child, though even this is subject to question. Regardless, Molly Welsh’s story is one that does not appear to stand alone. Through her we might see how women survived their indentures and prospered, or managed at the very least to endure life in Maryland, women whose lives until now never managed to become a footnote in anyone’s biography.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: LOCATING MOLLY WELSH: MEMORY AND MYTH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
• I THE DAIRYMAID AND THE PRINCE
• II “OF THE DEEPEST DYE”: EARLY NARRATIVES
• III “A REMARKABLY FAIR COMPLEXION”: THE EMERGENCE OF MOLLY WELSH
• IV “ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MOLLY WELSH’S CHARACTER
• V “THE TALE AS IT WAS TOLD FOR A HUNDRED YEARS ON THE RIDGE”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARS REVITALIZE MOLLY’S STORY
• VI “TRUE NOBILITY’S CONFINED TO NONE”: MOLLY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• VII “BUT WHAT ARE COLOURS? DO COMPLEXIONS CHANGE?” TWENTYFIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MOLLY WELSH.114
• VIII EPILOGUE
• APPENDICES
  • I CHRONOLOGY OF PRINT CONCERNING ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER
  • II BANNEKER FAMILY TREE
  • III INTERNET RESPONSES TO MOLLY WELSH
  • IV MARYLAND LAWS DIRECTLY PERTAINING TO SLAVERY, RACE, INDENTURED SERVITUDE, WOMEN, AND MARRIAGE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
  • V 1685 INDENTURE
  • VI A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSPORTATION RECORDS
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire thesis here.

afro look: Die Geschichte einer Zeitschrift von schwarzen Deutschen

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
May 2000
245 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9978512
ISBN: 9780599844605

Francine Jobatey

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University  Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Purchase the dissertation here.

(W)rites of passing: The performance of identity in fiction and personal narratives

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
February 2006
108 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3212756
ISBN: 9780542630743

Tracy L. Vaughn

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2006 Department of English

In my dissertation, “(W)rites of Passing: The Performance of Identity in Fiction and Personal Narratives,” I explore the literary, historical, psychological and cultural dimensions of passing, particularly as it relates to race and class. Through the works of Arnold van Gennep, Stephen Greenblatt, and Victor Turner, I have discovered intriguing comparisons between the forms of “class-passing” presented in 16th and18 th century British novels with 20th and 21st century “race passing” novels.

In much of my work on race passing and African American literature, I argue that while racial passing may have brought certain socio-economic benefits to those who passed (whether temporarily or permanently,) it also invariably forced them to engage in what I would describe as exercises of restraint. These exercises of restraint might manifest themselves in various forms of cultural impotency ranging from a loss and/or repression of emotional expressivity to a more extreme decision to be voluntarily childless—a forced barrenness, if you will. One of the main questions my research attempts to answer is: “Does the act of passing, whether it be through race or class, reinforce the very hierarchy it seems to subvert?” Also, if in fact race and/or class are identities that are performative, then what role does the audience play in permitting individuals to pass? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, I apply performance theory as a lens to provide a clearer and perhaps alternative perspective to the ways in which passing is both implicit (through the individual’s choice to pass) and complicit (through the audience’s suspension of disbelief.) My research questions how much responsibility the audience carries in the passing individual’s effort to pass successfully. At the same time, I discuss how the performance element of improvisation is absolutely necessary in the process and act of passing. What I have defined as the “process of passing” is a variation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage : a performance ritual with “distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups [and individuals] become adjusted to internal changes, and adopt them to their external environment.” Van Gennep’s three phases of separation, transition and incorporation that define a rite of passage serve as the foundation of my definition of the process of passing.

Purchase the dissertation here.