{"id":58916,"date":"2019-09-19T23:04:38","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T23:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58916"},"modified":"2019-09-19T23:04:38","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T23:04:38","slug":"for-someone-so-utterly-unsentimental-and-sternly-rational-about-race-and-blackness-he-indulged-his-wifes-strange-neoessentialist-belief-in-hybrid-vigor-that-is-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58916","title":{"rendered":"For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife\u2019s strange neoessentialist belief in \u201chybrid vigor\u201d\u2014that is, her belief that their daughter\u2019s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race."},"content":{"rendered":"

He [George Schuyler<\/a>] was a man of contradictions. For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife\u2019s [Josephine Cogdell<\/a>] strange neoessentialist belief in \u201chybrid vigor<\/a>\u201d\u2014that is, her belief that their daughter\u2019s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race. With Schuyler\u2019s help, his wife turned their only daughter into a social experiment, raising Philippa<\/a> on a scientifically prepared diet of raw meat, unpasteurized milk, and castor oil, and keeping her in near isolation from other children. The child\u2019s strange upbringing was both a raging success and a terrible failure. Philippa learned to read at two, became an accomplished pianist at four, and a composer by five. She was a child celebrity, a kind of black Shirley Temple<\/a> with a high IQ<\/a> who became the subject of scores of articles in publications such as Time<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, and The New Yorker<\/em>, and was roundly hailed as a genius. There is a poignant moment in Kathryn Talalay\u2019s biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White<\/em><\/a>, when Philippa is thirteen and her parents finally show her the detailed scrapbook they\u2019ve been keeping about her upbringing and career\u2014notes and articles they\u2019ve been keeping diligently over the years. Philippa, rather than being touched, was horrified to realize, with sudden clarity, all the ways she\u2019d been her parents\u2019 social experiment and \u201cpuppet.\u201d In the years that followed, she grew increasingly disillusioned with America, her own blackness, and the musical career of her youth. Like a character out of Black No More<\/em><\/a>, she eventually changed her name and began to pass as white<\/a>\u2014as an Iberian-American named Filipa Montera. She spent most of her adult life overseas, still playing music, but less seriously, and trying to find herself in various romantic affairs. She eventually tried to reinvent herself as an international journalist and children\u2019s advocate, and in 1967 she died in a helicopter crash while attempting to evacuate war orphans out of Vietnam<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Danzy Senna, \u201cGeorge Schuyler: An Afrofuturist Before His Time<\/a>,\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>, January 19, 2018. https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2018\/01\/19\/george-schuyler-an-afrofuturist-before-his-time\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He [George Schuyler] was a man of contradictions. For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife\u2019s [Josephine Cogdell] strange neoessentialist belief in \u201chybrid vigor\u201d\u2014that is, her belief that their daughter\u2019s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race. With Schuyler\u2019s help, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1340,8685,30264,834,30281,1753,14230,1755,7008],"class_list":["post-58916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-danzy-senna","tag-george-s-schuyler","tag-george-samuel-schuyler","tag-george-schuyler","tag-kathryn-m-talalay","tag-kathryn-talalay","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-philippa-schuyler","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58916","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=58916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58918,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58916\/revisions\/58918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}