{"id":19240,"date":"2011-12-25T22:02:38","date_gmt":"2011-12-25T22:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19240"},"modified":"2011-12-25T22:03:05","modified_gmt":"2011-12-25T22:03:05","slug":"i-was-black-when-it-suited-me-i-was-white-when-it-suited-me-racial-identity-in-the-biracial-life-of-marguerite-davis-stewart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19240","title":{"rendered":"“I Was Black When It Suited Me; I Was White When It Suited Me”: Racial Identity in the Biracial Life of Marguerite Davis Stewart"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I Was Black When It Suited Me; I Was White When It Suited Me”: Racial Identity in the Biracial Life of Marguerite Davis Stewart<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of American Ethnic History<\/a>
\nVolume 26, Number 4<\/a>, Women’s Voices, Ethnic Lives through Oral History (Summer, 2007)
\npages 24-49<\/p>\n

A. Glenn Crothers<\/a><\/strong>
\nUniversity of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky<\/em><\/p>\n

Tracy E. K’Meyer<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nUniversity of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky<\/em><\/p>\n

Sitting onthe rooftop restaurant of the fictional Drayton Hotel in Chicago, Irene Redfield, the occasional “passer<\/a>” and protagonist of Nella Larsen’s<\/a> Passing<\/a><\/em>, is suddenly swept with panic when she notices another woman\u2014ostensibly a white woman\u2014staring at her. “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” Redfield asked herself. “No,” she concludes after some time, “the woman sitting there staring couldn’t possibly know” because a light-skinned woman like herself was usually mistaken “for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.” Despite her assurance, Redfield still was troubled by the experience. She “felt, in turn ” Larsen writes, “anger, scorn, and fear slide over her.” Larsen’s fiction, based in the reality of African American life in the 1920s, provides a clear portrait of what sociologist F. James Davis has called “the agony of passing,” the fear of exposure by both the white and black communities. Fast forward to the end of the twentieth century, when in contrast to Larsen’s fearful passer Irene, such popular figures as Tiger Woods<\/a> celebrate their mixed-race backgrounds and when the U.S. Census, which, as one sociologist puts it, “counts what the nation wants counted,” offers such individuals the opportunity to reject old categories and self-identify as “other.”<\/p>\n

Marguerite Davis Stewart’s life spanned the decades between these two poles of racial experience, between tension-wrought “passing” and the embrace of multiracial identities. About the same time Larsen was envisioning the scene at the fictional Drayton Hotel, Stewart and her mother, light-skinned, African American women from Louisville, Kentucky<\/a>, were staying at an all-white hotel in French Lick, Indiana<\/a>. Brought to the hotel by a white man who loved Stewart’s mother, Stewart, a child at the time, remembered no sense of panic, no sense of fear in this environment. “Any time my people wanted to do what they wanted to do, they did what they damned [well] pleased,” including…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I Was Black When It Suited Me; I Was White When It Suited Me”: Racial Identity in the Biracial Life of Marguerite Davis Stewart Journal of American Ethnic History Volume 26, Number 4, Women’s Voices, Ethnic Lives through Oral History (Summer, 2007) pages 24-49 A. Glenn Crothers University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky Tracy E. K’Meyer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,13,6462,20,25],"tags":[8883,8882,495,8881,8875,8877,8876,8874,8884,8885],"class_list":["post-19240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-liveevents","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-a-glenn-crothers","tag-journal-of-american-ethnic-history","tag-kentucky","tag-louisville","tag-marguerite-davis","tag-marguerite-davis-stewart","tag-marguerite-n-davis","tag-marguerite-nelsenia-davis","tag-tracy-e-kmeyer","tag-tracy-kmeyer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}