{"id":5649,"date":"2010-03-05T03:04:55","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T03:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5649"},"modified":"2010-03-05T03:46:20","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T03:46:20","slug":"keeping-up-with-the-joneses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5649","title":{"rendered":"Keeping up with the Joneses"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8230;Like many families of mixed ancestry and interracial families in the Northeast, the Joneses seemed to live in an ambiguous space in the American system of racial classification.\u00a0 They seemed to be neither denying nor actively claiming a black racial identity.\u00a0 Sociologists of the time and current historians have documented a number of cases\u2014indeed a pattern\u2014of mixed-race or mixed-marriage families living quietly in small &#8220;white&#8221; towns.\u00a0 Unlike the model of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Passing_(racial_identity)\" target=\"_blank\">passing<\/a>,&#8221; in with formerly black-identified individuals or families would become white-identified, many of these individuals and families simply lived in the spaces between absolutes.\u00a0 Less consciously a political act of affirmation or denial of self, racial ambiguity enabled such individuals and families to embrace the multiple histories that constituted them.\u00a0 They were black and white and other.\u00a0 They understood that American society lacked a suitably dexterous category for those who defied the conventions of perception and boundary.\u00a0 Former <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kentukcy\" target=\"_blank\">Kentucky<\/a> politician <a href=\"http:\/\/www.womeninkentucky.com\/site\/public_service\/m_kidd.html\" target=\"_blank\">Mae Street Kidd<\/a>, born to a black mother and white father in 1904, summarized the sentiment of\u00a0many when she wrote, &#8220;I never made an issue of my race.\u00a0 I let people think or believe what they\u00a0wanted to.\u00a0 If it was ever a problem, then it was their problem, not mine.&#8221;&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Lewis, Earl and Heidi Adrizzone<\/strong>. <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=3664\" target=\"_blank\">Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 New York: W. W. Norton. 2002. Pages\u00a036-37.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;Like many families of mixed ancestry and interracial families in the Northeast, the Joneses seemed to live in an ambiguous space in the American system of racial classification.\u00a0 They seemed to be neither denying nor actively claiming a black racial identity.\u00a0 Sociologists of the time and current historians have documented a number of cases\u2014indeed a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,459,125,394,20],"tags":[1434,2375,2374,1445,762],"class_list":["post-5649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-earl-lewis","tag-heidi-adrizzone","tag-mae-street-kidd","tag-rhinelander-v-rhinelander","tag-rhinelanderjones-case"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5649","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=5649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}