Mixed Race Studies

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
Selection of papers from a conference held in
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
pages 86-90

Angeline Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts

People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).

So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…

Read the paper here.

 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

Modern Language Studies
Volume 32, Number 2 (Autumn, 2002)
pages 109-138

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea with two of her childhood friends. To the astonishment of the two women, Bellew greets his wife with an unusual pet name: “Nig.” When Clare asks her husband to explain his form of address to the stunned women, he replies, “When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (171). The moment is rich in dramatic irony, for unbeknownst to Bellew, his wife and her two friends are African Americans who are passing as white.

Although Bellew calls his wife “Nig” as a “joke” (171), the interpellation works to erase Clare’s given name, which connotes clearness, light, and whiteness. That Clare responds to this nickname seals the process of subjection. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon notes the power of interpellation to constitute and deform the black body through a racialized naming such as “nigger” or “Negro.” In Fanon’s famous example of racial interpellation, the cry “Look a Negro!” pairs the derogatory naming with the fixing of the look. The simultaneous gaze (“Look”) and naming (“a Negro”) freeze the black man into “an object in the midst of other objects” (109). In Passing, Clare’s husband warns her that if she “don’t look out”—…

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

Read the entire paper here.

Carothers McCaslin’s Progeny Tracing the Theme of Redemption Chronologically Through the Multiracial McCaslins

Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
1999
Paper 211
pages 38-50

Christine Reiss
Western Kentucky University

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel that depicts the complicated family history of the McCaslins. There are primarily three branches of the family: the white, male-descended McCaslins, the white, female-descended Edmondses, and the multiracial, male-descended Beauchamps. The multiracial line of the family, the Beauchamps, are the progeny of the original McCaslin patriarch, old Carothers McCaslin. His act of miscegenation with one of his slaves produces a daughter, on whom he then fathers a son. This act of miscegenation and incest sets in motion a family line that struggles with the weight of its father’s sin. The individuals seek to live the most liberated lives that they can, given the various social constraints with which they come into contact, and by the end of the novel, they accomplish a fair measure of freedom, perhaps even redemption, from their father’s sin.

Read the entire paper here.

Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil

Centre for Brazilian Studies
University of Oxford
Working Paper Number CBS-47-03
2003
52 pages

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

The search to define Brazil and Brazilians by colour, more specifically by a miscegenation so extreme that it appears exceptional, is longstanding. Mid-nineteenth century naturalists that visited the country from Europe were astounded by the lush vegetation, the wide variety of fauna, and another phenomena – a type of unprecedented laboratory of humans and their various races. Local intellectuals also focused on the racial theme, but more as explanation for their perceptions of national degeneration than racial mixture. It is from these origins that debate reappears as an official model in the 1930s and persists until today in notions about what makes Brazil unique. After an introduction of this historical context, and rejecting the myth of racial democracy, this paper reflects on the impasses of race anew and from a different perspective attuned to contemporary problems. The central question that remains is whether race is a social and economic variable or whether Brazilian identities are dispersed across a wide rainbow of color. The goal of this paper is to use recent census and 1996 PNAD data that reveal 136 categories for Brazilians to identify several specific characteristics of this debate. This analysis implies a more political discussion of the limits of citizenship in a country where the color line is always viewed subjectively and contextually. The maxim of the sixteenth century Jesuit, Antonil, that “Brazil is hell for negros, purgatory for whites, and paradise for mulattos” still appears to resonate.

Read the entire paper here.

Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

Zygon Center for Religion and Science
Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
2011-03-25
13 pages

Kevin Patrick Considine
Loyola University, Chicago

My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

Read the entire paper here.

Multiracial Identity: New Models and Frameworks for Describing and Understanding the Experience of Race and Identity

National Conference on Race & Ethnicity (NCORE) 2012
New York, New York
2012-05-29 through 2012-06-02
Date & Time To Be Determined

Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Ed.D, Consultant in Organizational Development and Social Justice Education

For two decades, research on Multiracial people has challenged, advanced, and re-framed how we view race and identity in the United States.  The impact of foundational, as well as new models of Multiracial identity is evident in the content of emerging perspectives on social identity, including Intersectionality. This highly interactive session includes a brief review of ways Multiracial identity has been framed over the past 20 years, including key issues that both support and challenge traditional theories of racial identity development.  A new model of multiracial identity that incorporates aspects of intersectionality is presented and demonstrated as a learning and programming tool.  Interactive discussion allows participants to examine questions often raised by the topic of Multiracial identity on campus, such as: to what extent is racial identity chosen as opposed to assigned? Do racial groups embody aspects of culture, and if so, what is Multiracial culture? To what extent should institutional policies and practices change to accommodate Multiracial people? and What interventions and programs have been successful in meeting the needs of Multiracial students, and what can we learn from our mistakes?

For more information, click here.

Bridgetower – Black Musicians and British Culture, 1807-2007

Gresham College
2007-07-02

Mike Phillips, Professor of Music
Gresham College

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the son of an Abyssinian slave, was hailed as a musical prodigy in the eighteenth century. Taught by Haydn, his appearance at the court in Windsor to play in front of George III led to his subsequent ‘adoption’ by the Prince Regent. Friends with Beethoven—Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata and they gave the first performance together—his life offers a powerful symbolism for the creation and establishment of a black British community which has its roots in the 18th century importation and migration of slaves and ex-slaves.

Professor Mike Phillips is the librettist for the newly-commissioned opera, Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, to be given its premier as a part of the City of London Festival on the 5th of July. He will be discussing the role of black musicians in British culture in the two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade act.

I must begin by making it clear that I am not an academic researcher or an expert on slavery or an expert on the culture and customs of the Caribbean or Africa, and I have not spent many years in the British Library digging up obscure facts about this topic.  So I am not going to get into arcane disputes about the precise number of black musicians who lived in Southwark or how often they did their laundry!  But I have read a considerable amount about the topic.  I am a novelist and a curator and I have written an exhausting number of words about the history of black people in Britain.  This is not a talk about urban rioting or reggae or calypso or gospel music or jazz, although these forms dominate the experience of recent years.  I am telling you this partly because I am going to end at the end of the 19th Century, because I only have an hour, and if I got on to the 20th Century, I would be here all night!  But in fact, because of the subject of the new opera Bridgetower, a Fable of 1807, and because in general this part of the City of London Festival has focused on the 18th Century and the early 19th Century, I will be dealing roughly with those years.

The other point is that, in general, we tend to talk about black people in Britain, or about the multiracial nature of the population, as if it was an exclusively 20th Century phenomenon.  We talk about the respective cultures as if they existed behind barriers, and we talk as if the colour of people’s skins defines their cultural prospects and abilities, a tendency which is an exact match for the strictures of 18th Century racial science, with its appalling attempts to categorise human beings in line with a preordained network of characteristics.

Even now, in this country, young black musicians still face a series of nudges in the direction of what everyone will describe as ‘their culture’, meaning steel bands and rapping.  Young black musicians who lean towards classical forms will be more or less guaranteed a difficult time—it would be easier if they wanted to do percussion.  Historically, that has meant that, by and large, black musicians in Europe have been written out of the narrative of the very landscape that they helped to shape, and we find ourselves obliged to rediscover figures like the Chevalier de Saint-George or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—people who were household names in their own time.

In that context, one of the most illuminating and reassuring aspects of looking at the lives of black cultural figures in Britain and Europe is that if you go back between the 16th Century and the 20th Century, you encounter black artists, poets, novelists and musicians who had no problems nor inhibitions in engaging in the cultural environment in which they found themselves.  In the process, they tended to affect the culture in which they lived in various specific ways.

I mentioned the 19th Century, but as far back as 1505 we have an African drummer working for James IV in Edinburgh, arranging a dance with dancers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday festivities.  Black musicians are repeatedly mentioned in pageants, fairs and at least one tournament from the 16th Century onwards.

If you come to the 18th Century, they’re relatively well-known—black musicians like Cato, who ended up as a head gamekeeper to the Prince of Wales around about 1740, and who was reputed to blow the best French horn and trumpet in his time.  In the 18th Century, Londoners were already dancing in what were called black hops, where 12 pence would get you admission…

…But I will go on to talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.  Bridgetower is an interesting person, not simply because he was born in the Esterhazy household; not simply because he was black; not because he was a child protégé, but all those things together, at the time when he arrived in Britain and during his career, had a particular kind of significance…

Read the lecture here.
Download the video (very large! 330 MB).
Download the audio (56.5 MB).

Advertising “Interraciality” and “Multiraciality” In ObamaLand—Representations and Images in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
34th Annual National Council for Black Studies
Sheraton New Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
2010-03-17

William Berry

This study examined the representation and contextualization of interraciality and multiraciality in newspaper advertising supplements . Since the election of Barack Obama, media reports have expressed that pre-2008 constructs/contexts of race and ethnicity have evolved into what scholars have theorized as the “post-racial” era. A literature review determined that the advertising industry was among the last sites of consumerism to bring African Americans into typical roles as users of general market products/services, except when they appeared in advertisements placed in Black newspapers/magazines. A content analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which representations of multiracial families, couples, and friends—from childhood through adulthood—have appeared in advertisements from national retail chains, including JC Penney, Sears, and Wal-Mart. The study found that while interraciality and multiraciality are presented prominently in advertising supplements, these representations rarely depict individuals engaging in interactions that suggest they are family members or involved in intimate relationships, or that these engagements can be expected to occur within the home or other private, personal spaces where individuals significantly are more likely to interact closely with others of the same race or ethnic descent. Implications of the findings are that intimate interracial relationships may continue to be taboo and forbidden, in effect continuing as the “third rail” of the consumer society, consistent with how such advertisements were not produced or presented during most of the twentieth century.

Lectures delivered by John Powell under the auspices of the lectureship in Music

The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Volume 10, Number 3 (July 1923)
pages 107-163

Lectures delivered by John Powell
Palace Theatre of Houston
1923-04-05 through 1923-04-06

John Powell

Table of Contents

• I. Music and the Individual (20 pages)
• II. Music and the Nation (38 pages)

From “Music and the Nation”

This is America, a large country. We are the hope of the world. We stand for and safeguard the liberty of the world. We are the greatest country that ever existed or ever will exist. People of every race and clime have come to our shores, The white, the yellow, the red, the black, and the brown are all here in this great melting-pot. They are all free and equal in the brotherhood of man. Eventually they will fuse into a homogeneous mass, and the outcome of this amalgamation will be the highest type of humanity ever known in history—because this is America.

Nobody has more respect for America nor more pride in her than I myself. But it seems to me that the folly of this idea surpasses anything that has ever come within my knowledge. It is idiocy to suppose that mere contact with American soil can change age-old hereditary characters; that, because this is America, the action of ineluctable, biological laws will be suspended. The melting-pot should rather be termed the “witches’ cauldron.” And we can be well assured that no miraculous alchemy will transmute these tainted strains into the perfect superman. Indeed, nothing more preposterous than this theory has ever been preached to a long-suffering people. Why, we would not think of subjecting even our domestic animals to such conditions as these! Everyone knows that if he wishes to breed thorough-bred horses he cannot admix inferior breeds into the stock. The same applies to flowers, to garden vegetables. How dare we sit still and let happen to our children-bone of our bone, blood of our blood-that which we would not allow to happen to the very beasts of the field. I wish here and now to enter my protest against this insidious, this hideous doctrine with every drop of blood in my veins and every ounce of vigor in my body.

If there were no other reason for rejecting this solution of general miscegenation, the negro problem would furnish good and sufficient grounds. If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting-pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under the Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro blood makes the negro. We also know that no higher race has ever beqn able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

With the constant interchange of population between Europe and America, Europe would likewise inevitably become tainted. This would mean the degeneration of the whole Caucasian race, the annihilation of white civilization. For not only are the physical characteristics of the negro predominant, but the universal experience of the past, as well as the study of our own hybrids and the other negroid peoples of the present time, proves conclusively that his psychology is also hereditarily predominant. This is the reason why every race which has mixed blood with him has decayed. If we, in America, allow this contamination to proceed unchecked, our civilization is inexorably doomed, For the transmission of these characters is effected through the germ plasm; and, whether we accept or discard the more extreme deductions of Weismann, we must still admit that the poison is too deeply embedded to be eradicable by education, or by material, social, or political advantages. Once let our germ plasm become tainted, and all is irrevocably lost. For, granting that natural selection and the course of evolution might eventually produce from this contaminated mass a race of high order, even then aæons would have to elapse before any appreciable results could show themselves, and Anglo-Saxon civilization would long since have vanished eternally from the face of the earth. But if we reject this melting-pot solution, what is left to us?…

Read both papers here and here.