Mixed Race Studies

The Pain of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016
pages 264-269
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2016.0028

Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.95.

In the past year, racial passing became the subject of intense media controversy and scrutiny when it was discovered that Rachel Dolezal, then-head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, was a white woman who had misrepresented herself as being partly black. In the wake of the media frenzy that followed, commentators took pains to point out that, even though it was unusual to see a white assuming an identity as black, passing itself was nothing new in U.S. history. “The history of people breaching social divides and fashioning identities for themselves is as old as America,” an editorial in the New York Times proclaimed in response to the controversy. But while the act of passing has long been a part of the American story, it has not, until now, been the subject of a sweeping chronological and narrative history. A Chosen Exile by historian Allyson Hobbs succeeds in the ambitious project of crafting a social and cultural history of the most famous version of the practice, that of people of black ancestry who passed as white. Racial passing, of course, was meant to be hidden and to leave no trace. But in A Chosen Exile, Hobbs demonstrates not only that sources exist to recover the history of blacks who assumed white identities, but also that historians have offered a rather onesided story of black-to-white passing that does not mine the experience fully for what it can tell us about the lived experience of racial identity in different eras in American history.

Drawing on creative research in sources—including runaway slave ads, diaries and letters, census and military data, student college records, and novels—A Chosen Exile offers a wide-ranging chronological history of the experience of blacks who passed as white from the late eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. In taking that approach to the subject, it stands out from most of the existing literature on passing. Scholarly work on passing, for the most part, falls into one of two camps: studies by literary and media scholars that explore literary and cultural representations of the practice, such as Gayle Wald’s Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000) or more historical works that take a biographical approach to reconstruct the lives and stories of specific individuals or families who passed as white. Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (2009), for example, sheds light on the strange life of Lawrence Dennis, a former child-preacher who chose to pass as white and who eventually became an outspoken supporter of fascism in the 1930s. Legal historian Daniel Sharfstein follows the lives of three families who changed from black to white from the colonial era to today in The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America (2012). But A Chosen Exile has a much broader scope. Although Hobbs offers lengthy discussions of some key historical figures, she seeks to bring together as many stories of passing as possible to “reveal larger social, cultural, and national dynamics that would be far less visible if viewed through a lens fixed on the idiosyncrasies of a single person, family, or place” (p. 25).

That approach enables Hobbs to develop arguments about how the meanings and practice of passing have changed over time—arguments that are simply not possible in works that are more narrowly focused. She shows, for example, that passing was a relatively egalitarian practice that both elites and the poor engaged in when circumstances allowed; although, as the book progresses, it is clear that Hobbs has found more evidence to reconstruct the stories of economically privileged blacks than she has for poorer ones. She includes the experiences of both men and women who crossed the color line, and she compares the experiences of those who passed strategically—or who temporarily claimed a white identity in order…

Drawing Black History

Bostonia
Fall 2015

Rich Barlow, Staff Writer

Artwork by Joel Christian Gill

Graphic novels bring forgotten stories to life

Home to about 50 mixed-race descendants of a freed slave, Malaga Island off the coast of Maine seemed an oasis of racial harmony in 1912. But then the state, lobbied by ostensible “reformers” who claimed that residents were living in poverty—and perhaps tempted by a land grab too good to pass up—evicted the islanders. The majority who complied were the lucky ones. Those who held out were netted in the nascent eugenics fervor: declared feebleminded, they were confined and in some cases castrated.

Despite an official apology from Maine’s governor in 2010 and a radio documentary about the case, Malaga’s story might have remained little known but for Joel Christian Gill (CFA’04). His graphic anthology Strange Fruit, published last year by Colorado-based Fulcrum, uses comics to tell the stories of African Americans whose contributions and sufferings occupy fringes in the country’s historical memory….

Read the entire article here.

Essence Fest: How Prince helped Misty Copeland discover artistic freedom

The New Orleans Times-Picayune
2016-07-02

Chelsea Brasted, Lifestyle and Culture Reporter

Misty Copeland recounted her own Prince tribute Saturday (July 2) during an Essence Fest weekend full of them. But for the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, the music star was a friend before she’d ever even seen him in concert.

“I’d never seen him perform live,” Copeland said during an interview with Soledad O’Brien on the festival’s Empowerment Experience stage. Copeland was emotional as she continued her story, adding, “I approached this relationship as this really hilarious quiet guy that became my friend, then I stepped onstage with him for the first time and I was like, OK, I get it now. Like, wow.”…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Black, White, and Indian in Wisconsin Farm Country, 1850s–1910s

Middle West Review
Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2016
pages 53-84
DOI: 10.1353/mwr.2016.0009

Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, Associate Professor of History
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan

Fig 1. Location of the Revels kindred community in Forest Township, Vernon County, Wisconsin. Map courtesy of the author.

In 1908, Effie Revels penned a memoir, titled the “Diary of the Revels Family,” which chronicled the westward journey taken by her parents, Morning and Micajah, in 1854. After struggles in their Georgia and North Carolina homelands, they obtained a U.S. land patent in western Wisconsin’s Vernon County. There, in a place to which Ho-Chunks returned yearly and which Sauks had recently left, the Revelses helped to found the Forest Township farm neighborhood in the county’s northeastern portion. Effie described their 160 acres as the “roughest that part knows of;” its sharp-rising ridges and deep-plunging valleys made planting and harvesting difficult. But the family’s skill and cooperation with neighbors yielded prosperity into the 1890s. Flora Revels, Morning’s and Micajah’s great-granddaughter, loved Forest’s annual picnics of that era, where kin and friends, as she recalled in an oral history interview, heard “preaching,” plus “speaking, singing, and a program.” The people who enjoyed these events hailed from the upper South, like Flora’s forebears, as well as the lower Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and Europe.

This is the stuff of standard pioneer stories and popular culture. But the more we read of Effie and the more we listen to Flora, the clearer their stories’ challenge to classic white frontier narratives becomes. From 1860 through 1880, census takers labeled 14 percent of Forest’s population, including these women and their Arms, Bass, Delaney, Roberts, Revels, Shivers, and Waldon kin—hereafter collectively called the Revels kindred or Forest’s families—“mulatto” or occasionally “black.” They called themselves “colored,” “Indian,” and “Cherokee,” and they invoked Robeson Indian ties.

This article examines how contests over belonging and transitions to racialized thinking arose at the intersection of American modernity and traditional Indigenous and rural values. It argues, first, that Forest’s founding generation of the 1850s through 1870s did not separate into oppositional, mutually exclusive racial groups. Rather, Wisconsin’s relative civil rights tolerance, displacement of Ho-Chunks, and abundant land allowed the Revels kindred’s U.S. southern Indigenous kin- and land-based belonging and their radical abolitionism to flourish; all of these bound the kindred together. Second, mixing between people whose lives bridged Indigenous-, African-, and Euro-American influences continued during Forest’s 1880s and 1890s post-settlement era. The kindred’s leadership in traditional rural sociability promoted inclusivity. Their modern commercial farming and divergence from allegedly uncivilized African Americans, Ho-Chunks, and Sauks made them model midwesterners and Americans. These factors worked against their racialization. Third, a shift occurred in the late 1890s and early 1900s: The kindred divided into “black,” “white,” and “Indian” when Forest’s traditional close-knit community and kinship collided with modern reconfigurations of race, market pressures, and gender anxieties. Simultaneous to kindred members’ loss of landed independence and manhood, federal officials sought to replace non-racialized and ambiguous statuses with fixed certainty. They predicated U.S. citizenship on racial purity and on quantified Indianness. Cherokees, in response, tried to protect their rights by codifying and sometimes racializing membership.

These arguments enrich a history of the Midwest in which Indigenous lives remain unevenly analyzed, especially their intersections with the region’s African diaspora. Amid a wealth of scholarship on Euro-Indian ties, those few works that do examine midwestern African-Indian connections confine their analysis to the Ho-Chunk, Illini, Ojibwe, Mesquakie, or Sauk. Moreover, they often focus on colonial and early republic Indian-French-British trading culture. They omit other Indigenous midwesterners, who came as farmers from the upper South in the mid-1800s. These included not only the Wisconsin-based Revelses, but also similar kindreds who created substantial communities that combined Indigenous and African diasporic influences: the Beech and Roberts settlements in Indiana’s Rush and Hamilton counties; the Calvin Colony in Cass County, Michigan; and the Longtown Settlement straddling Darke County, Ohio, and Rush County, Indiana. Consideration of the Revels kindred expands understanding of what we mean by the “Indigenous Midwests,” revealing new connections…

Calidad, Genealogy, and Disputed Free-colored Tributary Status in New Spain

The Americas
Volume 73, Number 2, April 2016
pages 139-170

Norah Andrews, Assistant Professor of World History
Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey

In 1787, a group of Indians from the town of Almoloya, part of Apan in the Intendancy of Mexico, aired their grievances against several prominent local leaders. The petitioners claimed that their predominantly Indian community was plagued by a group of free-colored people who were masquerading as Indian nobles, or caciques, and enjoying privileges to which only those with noble lineage were entitled. One of these was exemption from the economically onerous and socially stigmatized royal tribute that had symbolized the relationship between the Spanish monarch and free-colored subjects since the sixteenth century.

To prove that the suspected were indeed tributaries, those lodging the complaint turned to lineage. They named more than a dozen people who lived as caciques, adding that those same individuals were “mixed with blacks and mulatos and should be registered and pay tribute with those of that class.” Despite their attempts to fashion themselves into caciques, the accused families had not erased from communal memory the occupations, castes, and places of origin of various ancestors, all of which could determine reputation, or calidad. Members of the Sánchez family, the petition claimed, were “grandchildren of a negro shoemaker called Martín.” The Granillos were “descendants of Juan Granillo, married to a known mulata servant.” The list of possible free-coloreds was exhaustive.

These “notorious mulatos” had gained exemptions awarded by the Spanish monarchy to Tlaxcalans who had served in Spanish conquests more than two and a half centuries before. Throughout the colonial period, descendants of Tlaxcalans could claim exemption from the tribute and other taxes, as well as land rights and a legal status distinct from those of free-coloreds and other Indians. This concern with the mixture of Indian and African blood resonated where Tlaxcalan, Nahua, or other Indian groups enjoyed place- and genealogy-specific tribute privileges. Apan bordered Tlaxcala, making the presence of Tlaxcalans in Almoloya entirely feasible. But to preserve such a status, the complainants reasoned, the Tlaxcalans should have pursued marital unions that preserved a lineage “without degeneration from the class of Indians or mestizos de españoles,” a caste category specifying a Spanish father and an Indian mother. How, wondered the Almoloya petitioners, could people with a publicly reputed line of free-colored ancestors possibly prove a Tlaxcalan genealogy?

The “pure Indians” of Almoloya, as they called themselves in their initial petition and subsequent documents, relied on genealogy to stake their claims. The petitioners upheld proof of ancestry as a prerequisite for exercising privileges, a legal argument favored by Indian elites at the time. The use of the term “degeneración” in the petition drew on an older rhetoric of purity as well as hereditary concepts that would become popular in the nineteenth century. The repeated references to the “mixed nature” and “inferior calidad” of these individuals undermined their authority as caciques. Indeed, cacique status was predicated on publicly regarded and written genealogies. These ideas rested on the genealogical concept of limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, which had risen to prominence as a form of communal memory following mass conversions of Jews in medieval Iberia. In New Spain, limpieza de sangre would evolve to equate genealogical impurity with the presence of African ancestry as well. Pitting the idea of an inferior, mixed, and mulato calidad against Indian purity, the petitioners used the language of genealogy to upend local hierarchies.

The case of Almoloya shows the prominent place genealogy took in disputes involving local privileges, rivalries, and migration from the 1780s to the 1800s. Ordinary people who engaged in those disputes were well aware of it. In Almoloya’s surrounding jurisdiction, between 1781 and 1788 the number of mulato tributaries nearly doubled, while the number of Indian tributaries dropped by 10 percent. On a register made at the end of the year 1800, no caciques were listed at all, though 407 Indians and 21 mulatos were registered as reserved from payment. The Almoloya caciques failed to prove their genealogy and thus became (or had always been, in…

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho (review)

American Studies
Volume 55, Number 1, 2016
pages 165-166
DOI: 10.1353/ams.2016.006

Jeehyun Lim, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. By Jennifer Ann Ho. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2015.

Jennifer Ho’s Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture raises timely questions about the category of Asian American at a time when reexaminations of identity categories are being actively carried out in what the feminist theorist Robyn Wiegman calls fields invested in identity knowledges. As Ho explains in her introduction, questioning the definition of Asian American in and of itself is not a new project. The category of Asian American, while rooted in grassroots social movements of the 1960s and meant to counter the demeaning signification of “Oriental,” has been scrutinized, if not solely then most forcefully, by poststructural critiques such as Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise. Yet Ho’s project differs from existing critiques in at least two regards. First, it consistently illuminates the concept of racial ambiguity—mostly through mixed-race identities and identifications but also through other norm-defying and transgressive identities and identifications emerging variously from transracial adoptees to the definitions of Asian American texts—as the method of exposing and critiquing the multiple exclusions that arise in the vexed project of Asian American self-determination. Secondly, as much as it is invested in bringing into high relief the impossibility of a rigid and exclusionary definition of Asian American, it is likewise equally invested in reestablishing the category as an important site of knowledge production and of social and cultural engagement…

Nawal El Saadawi: “All people are mixed blood, the more mixed you are the better”

African Arguments
2016-06-24

Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, Research Fellow; Founder: Bookshy Blog
Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom

The iconic Egyptian writer speaks out about being ignored by “colonial capitalist patriarchal powers” and how today’s African women writers are leading a revolt.

With a career spanning half a century and encompassing some 60 works of fiction and non-fiction, Nawal El Saadawi is today one of the Arab world’s and Africa’s most pre-eminent figures.

Over several decades, the 84-year-old Egyptian’s books have challenged the status quo of patriarchal, religious and capitalist structures. And the writer has developed an international reputation as a courageous activist who carries on questioning those in power in spite of the dangers that can come with it.

According to Saadawi, she inherited her rebellious side from her parents and paternal grandmother, and her willingness to speak out has been clear throughout her writing. In her many works, she has tackled a range of controversial topics such as female genital mutilation, sex work, violence against women, and religious fundamentalism. And she has explored these complex issues through both fiction – in the likes of Women at Point Zero, Searching, and God Dies by the Nile – and non-fiction – such as in Women and Sex and various memoirs.

As a feminist writer and activist, Saadawi has raised awareness around women’s rights globally, but she has had a particularly strong influence on the feminist movement in her home country and amongst young Egyptians…

Read the entire article here.

Chi-chi Nwanoku: A classical legacy and an African heritage

Music Africa Magazine
2016-06-16

Ed Keazor

A short biography of Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE, world-renowned classical baroque bassist and Professor of Music, covering her life, influences and deep connections to her African roots.

Dr Michael Nwanoku adjusted himself in his seat as the next announcement was about to be made. He and his wife Margaret had looked forward to this day for several weeks and he had made the point of wearing his full Igbo Chief’s regalia, complete with the “Ozo” Cap and Coral beads. After all it was not every day one visited Buckingham Palace, neither was it every day that one witnessed one’s daughter receiving the award of a national honour from Queen Elizabeth II herself. His daughter, through sheer talent and hard work, had conquered years of adversity and some might say, prejudice to emerge as one of Britain’s finest Classical Musicians and academics. Almost in the same way, he and his Irish wife had conquered racism and ignorance in the course of their long and happy marriage. Dr and Mrs Nwanoku had too many good reasons to be proud of their eldest daughter, the talented Chi-chi Nwanoku, now Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) as she received her award from the Queen.

Chinyere (Chi-chi) Adah Nwanoku, was born in Fulham, London, in 1956 to Michael Nwanoku and the former Margaret Ivey. Her parents had met at a chance encounter at a dance in London, in 1955 and were inseparable from then on and they got married shortly afterwards. The young couple faced prejudice on account of their Interracial relationship at the time, recalling a period in Britain, where signs on Houses, advertising lodging vacancies, would boldly state, “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. The couple humorously recalled thanking God they didn’t have a dog (since they were both black and Irish)…

Read the entire article here.

‘Free State of Jones’ depicts realities of Reconstruction

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2016-07-03

Adam Domby, Assistant Professor of History
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

“Free State of Jones” is the film Reconstruction historians have been waiting for. Reconstruction, which encompassed the decade following the Civil War, is perhaps the most overlooked era in American history. It is the only period that doesn’t have a National Park Service site commemorating it.

Reconstruction, which witnessed the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the first widespread political enfranchisement of African-Americans, is ripe with stories for filmmakers.

Yet, since the racist celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone With the Wind” (1939), no major Hollywood film has addressed the violence and drama of the era.

Director Gary Ross has begun to fix this oversight by making a Reconstruction film disguised as a Civil War action flick…

Read the entire article here.

Mary Seacole statue unveiled at London ceremony

Nursing Standard
2016-07-01

Alistair Kleebauer

More than 200 years after her birth and 12 years after a campaign started to recognise her achievements, a statue to nurse heroine Mary Seacole has been unveiled in London.

To applause and loud cheers the permanent memorial to Mrs Seacole was unveiled in the garden of St Thomas’ Hospital on the banks of the River Thames.

The Jamaican-born nurse set up the British Hotel near Balaclava to provide soldiers with food and care during the Crimean War…

…British Army

Mrs Seacole, who was born in 1805 and died in 1881, nursed victims of cholera outbreaks in Jamaica and Panama in the 1850s, cared for victims of a yellow fever epidemic in 1853, and supervised British Army nursing services in Jamaica.

She was named the greatest black Briton in a 2004 poll.

The Times’ Crimean War correspondent Sir William Howard Russell wrote the following words about Ms Seacole’s service during the conflict, which have been inscribed on a memorial disc at the back of the statue:

‘I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.’…

Read the entire article here.