Mixed Race Studies

English 190: Research Seminar: Literature of Racial Passing

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2012

Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor of English

A passing narrative is an account—fiction or nonfiction—of a person (or group) claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she does not (or they do not) “possess.” Such narratives speak—directly, indirectly, and very uneasily—to the authenticity, the ambiguity, and the performance of personal identity; they also speak to issues of official and traditional categorization. The passing 
narrative—the narrative that accounts for making the “different” claim—necessarily unsettles notions of belonging and ownership and underscores that race can be viewed as a construction or a series of conventions.

The course will investigate the public nature of race by examining narratives—published and unpublished stories, novels, memoirs, and films—that call the absoluteness of its boundaries into question. We’ll look as well at texts that treat racial and sexual imitation—minstrelsy, “yellow-face,” drag, etc. All said, we’ll be looking rather closely at books and movies that reveal, document, question, and celebrate ambiguous spaces in an imposing structure, one often assumed to be “natural.”

We’ll likely read Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Gene Yang’s American-Born Chinese, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, essays by Gloria Anzaldua, Noel Ignatiev, Henry Louis Gates, etc. Films will probably include Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, Louis King’s Charlie Chan in Egypt, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, etc.

Position papers, discussions led by class members, possible midterm, final 12-15 page writing project involving research. Hybrid projects are welcome and encouraged.

The book list is tentative. Students should come to class before buying books.

Half-Polish, Half-Italian, All-Black

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-04-21

James Anthony Zoccoli

Little Jimmy is a half-Italian, half-Polish kid. When his parents divorce, he watches his family dynamic change when his mom gets remarried to an African-American man. Sometimes funny, sometimes complicated, the hard parts of growing up are easier to talk about from a grown-up point-of-view.

Listen to the podcast here.

the greek

Story Week Reader
Story Week Reader 2011
pages 31-32

Chris “C.T.” Terry, Writer, Editor, Educator

I was nervous on my first day working in the African-American Cultural Affairs section of my school’s Multicultural Office. My boss Kim introduced me to coworkers, and I imagined my blue eyes to be the subject of appraising gazes. I shook hands—no daps—and wondered if the brief, polite greetings I received were typical professional interactions, or if each person was thinking, “The nerve of this white boy, disturbing the sanctity of African-American Cultural Affairs!”

My mother is white, Irish-American. My father is black. I’m pale, with freckles. Usually, black people can tell that I’m mixed, and white people go, “Oh, I thought you were white, but, like, with an Afro.”

After growing up in a white area outside of white Boston, and having so many people mistake me for white, I get self-conscious around black people. If they don’t recognize my blackness, does it exist? At a party, I’ll screw up an elaborate handshake, clasping when I should be bumping, and one of the other black guys there looks away in shame. Then I die inside a little bit and vow to delete all Hank Williams from my iPod…

Read the entire essay here.

Complexity of Race In America

C-SPAN Video Library
Program ID: 305676-1
First Aired: 2012-06-03
New York Historical Society
New York, New York
2012-04-12

Brent Staples, Host
New York Times

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line [:Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White], discusses the complexity of race in America and one family’s perceived transformation from black to white. The New York Historical Society hosted this event.

Watch the video (00:53:19) here.

MixedRaceStudies.org Book Give-Away a Huge Success

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-06-19

Steven F. Riley

Photograph by Laura Kina

Thanks to the help of Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow, Jennifer Frappier, Sonia Kang and the rest of the Mixed Roots Film and Litterary Festival crew, my book give-away was a huge success!  I hope all of the winners will read and enjoy their books.

I purchased just over two-dozen books for the give-away and was lucky enough to also receive three more from Glenn Robinson of Mixed American Life. Also, University of California (Santa Barbara) Sociology Professor and (2012 Loving Prize recipient) G. Reginald Daniel graciously donated his latest monograph, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist.

I also want to thank Phil Wilkes Fixico for traveling to the festival to give me a copy of William Loren Katz’s Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage and Rudy Guevarra for signing and giving me a copy of his new work, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego.

Lastly, I want to thank Gino Pellegrini for the engaging and supportive conversation on Saturday and Duncan Ryuken Williams for the same on Sunday afternoon.

The books given away were:

1. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, Edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, (Duke University Press, 2010)
2. Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., (Rutgers University Press, 2012) (Thanks to Rudy Guevarra for signing a copy of his book.)
3. Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, William Loren Katz, (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2012)
4. Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America, Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh, (Channel Photographics, 2009) (A generous gift from Glenn Robinson.)
5. Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, Edited by Scott Withrow, (Backintyme Publishing 2010). (Thanks to Marvin T. Jones of The Chowan Discovery Group and author of the chapter “The Leading Edge of Edges: The Tri-racial People of the Winton Triangle” for signing.)
6. Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America, Tim Hashaw, (Mercer University Press, 2006)
7. Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, Erica Chito Childs, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009)
8. Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984-1999, Fred Wah, (NeWest Press, 2000)
9. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, Dorothy Roberts, (The New Press, 2011)
10. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow, (Algonquin Books, 2010)
11. How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity, Kevin R. Johnson, (Temple University Press, 1999)
12. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Daniel J. Sharfstein, (The Penguin Press, 2011)
13. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White, Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002)
14. Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, G. Reginald Daniel, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012) (A generous gift from G. Reginald Daniel)
15. Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, Kip Fulbeck, (Chronicle Books, 2010) (A generous gift from Glenn Robinson. Also thanks to Kip Fulbeck for signing.)
16. Memories of My Ghost Brother, Heinz Insu Fenkl, (Bo-Leaf Books, 1997)
17. Mixed Race Hollywood, Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas, (New York University Press, 2008). (Thanks to Camilla Fojas for signing the book.)
18. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order, G. Reginald Daniel, (Temple University Press, 2001)
19. Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity, Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen, (Routledge, 2010)
20. The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, Paisley Rekdal, (Vintage Press, 2000)
21. Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte, (Policy Press, 2012).
22. Part Asian, 100% Hapa: Portraits by Kip Fulbeck, Kip Fulbek, (Chronicle Books, 2006) (A second copy of this books was a generous gift from Glenn Robinson.)
23. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, Brian Bantum, (Baylor University Press, 2010)
24. Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Rainier Spencer, (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010)
25. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, Michele Elam, (Stanford University Press, 2011)
26. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Peggy Pascoe, (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 122-135
DOI: 10.1353/slj.2012.0009

William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina

“I Don’t Hate the South.”
— book title by Houston Baker, Jr.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun (73). His assumption—that the southern writer is a chronicler accessing the essence of a wholly objective place, transparently “explaining” a history to outsiders who misunderstand it—has been undermined by the theorizing in New Southern Studies. To chronicle the historical South as a special space enacts a social construction positing an ideologically reductive, essentialist regional myth. As Richard Gray argues, the invented South is an “imagined community” as well as a real and given space (xix). Diane Roberts terms it “the South of the mind” (371). Faulkner, conflicted and ghost-haunted by memories of the past, saw himself in the grip of a concrete reality so palpable that it could not be wiped away with time. But multiple communities, genders, and races lived in that past, and they stimulate divergent takes on it. Thus Houston Baker, Jr., borrowing from Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, ambivalently titled a recent book I Don’t Hate the South.

Black writers ghost-haunted by the southern past are highly wary of being possessed by the grip of a mythical mystique that marginalized black experience into historical invisibility. They know, as Martyn Bone argues, that the idealized southern geography rested economically on a social geography of slavery and it sequel segregation—realities that were suppressed in definitions of southern. As Bone notes, “this strategic exclusion is a structural and ideological necessity” for Agrarian-derived myth-making (3). For black writers, then, to perform southern chronicling one must enter history as a self-aware, reconfiguring maker of history. Resourcefully imaginative excavations are required to recover materials deeply buried and long suppressed. The result is an ongoing birthing of a multi-vocal history that presupposes the chronicler engages not in neutral reception but in a constructive act. The past is never past, and yet it must be newly conceived.

Two contemporary black chroniclers, Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey, interrogate the nature of the South with highly revealing metaphors of southern space and soil. They diverge from the familiar anxiety that the region is losing distinctiveness and that its culture is coming to an end. Against that fear of dispossession—of being uprooted from one’s communal memory by time and new cultural infusions—they express the need to take possession of the soil, to put roots into it so as to occupy new space instead of a tenuous space apart. Their poetry thus reflects the literary sensibility of black writers born after the civil rights gains of the mid-1960s. Growing up during profound cultural transitions—a social order of change and adaptive adjustments—they came to perceive historical inquiry not as monumentalizing the past into granite fixity but as excavation of pliable materials for revised narratives. Their poems are keen moments of individual consciousness in which the poet feels free to find and reshape the clay sediments of dug-up history.

In this respect they crack a barrier that confronted earlier black writers, namely the problem of occupying what I term “a space apart,” on the margin, where black life was kept out of history. In the post-bellum era, Charles W. Chesnutt’s dialect conjure tales ironically undermined the white nostalgic plantation tradition while tapping into oral black folk traditions. Yet, in adopting the plantation tale convention of a white frame narrator (his publisher Houghton Mifflin not indicating his racial identity due to his request that the work be judged on its merits rather than the author’s social status), Chesnutt subtly marginalized himself. Unfortunately this approach, a tactic of an era of accommodation, enfolded black materials inside the dominant white discourse domain, subtly distancing folk life to a quaint space apart. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects a new advance born of…

Slavery, Race, and Reunion: The NY Times White Washes the Rape of Michelle Obama’s Ancestors (Again)

We Are Respectable Negroes
2012-06-18

Chauncey DeVega

Why would any person honor rapist’s blood?

In an effort to write the Obamas, who are de facto American royalty, back into a larger post-racial narrative that ostensibly makes some white folks feel more comfortable about having a black President, such a move seems par for the course.

In 2009, the NY Times featured a very problematic story about how genealogical researchers had reconstructed Michelle Obama’s family tree. There, the NY Times offered up a story about one of the First Lady’s ancestors who was a child slave and in all likelihood repeatedly raped by her white master. Just as was done in Saturday’s Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden by Rachel Swarns, the realities of power and exploitation under the chattel regime were conveniently overlooked and (quite literally) white washed away.

Family tree DNA research is in vogue: networks such as PBS and ABC have found it a compelling means to craft a narrative about a shared “American experience.” Given the country’s demographic shifts, and the election of its first black President, there is a coincidence of interests who are deeply invested in furthering a narrative of multicultural America, one where it is imagined that we are all in one way or another related.

In this racial project, the color line is broken in some deeply dishonest ways which do nothing to challenge power, illuminate deeper truths about racial inequality in the United States, overturn white privilege, or challenge the Racial State. For example, Henry Louis Gates Jr. can discover his Irish roots. Tina Turner can find out she is not significantly related to the Cherokees. Latino stars and starlets can find out about their “exciting” Anglo-African-Indigenous roots. Asian Americans can find out about their long history of respect for education, family, and the arts…

..Because the President and First Lady are the symbolic leaders of a country in which black people were historically considered anti-citizens, less than human, property, and not fit for inclusion in the polity, the DNA citizenship project’s goals are robust. The discovery of Michelle Obama’s white ancestors—while no surprise to her family—is a way for white folks to find kinship with her…to “own” her. Ironically, this will do nothing to soothe the anxieties of Michelle Obama’s among reactionary white conservatives—to them she is a black woman who has no business being in the White House except as a chambermaid.

Likewise, President Obama may be “half-white.” Nevertheless, he is the blackest man alive (despite all efforts to distance himself from policies that would uniquely assist African-Americans) for the Tea Party GOP and the racially resentful, reactionary white public. Race is a double bind for the President. Obama’s whiteness is a means to excuse-make for their racism; Obama’s blackness is a means for white bigots to overtly disrespect and diminish him…

In response to the Times’ first foray into these ugly, ahistorical waters, I offered a commentary and rewrite. I would like to pivot off of that intervention again.

Let’s work through a few particularly rich passages in Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden and offer some correctives and commentary…

…The politics of language are rich here as they advance a multicultural, conservative, colorblind racial agenda that imposes contemporary standards onto the past in an effort to remove the grounds of historical grievance in the present. Melvinia did not give birth to a “biracial” child. She was raped and had a black child who would be considered human property unless freed by his “father.”

The Slaveocracy and America’s racial order was based on the “one-drop rule” where a child’s racial status and freedom was determined by that of the mother. Thus, a white man (and slave owner) could rape, exploit, and do as he wished with black women (and men). The children would be born slaves. The logic of hypodescent was also operative as well. Race is not about the reality of genetic makeup and admixture. Racial identity is about perceptions by the in-group regarding who belongs and who does not.

Despite all of the efforts by the multiracial movement in contemporary America to create a “mixed race” census category—what is really a desire to access white privilege through the creation of a buffer race or colored class—being perceived as “black” or as having “African” ancestry, marks a person as having a connection to that group.

The NY Times is working to frame the story of Michelle’s ancestors, and the child rapist, slave owning white Tribble family, as a human story and drama, one about “ordinary” people…

…The racial project of reading America as a multiracial project historically, in the service of a post-racial fiction about the Age of Obama in the present, is operative throughout the above passage. Rachel Swarns’ allusion to a “multiracial” stew ignores the role of law, practice, social norms, and the State in carefully policing the colorline.

These Americans of “mixed ancestry” were not celebrated. White authorities saw them as a problem to be corrected, “cured,” eliminated, and as a threat to American society. For example, white race scientists labored over what to do about the Whind tribe who were of mixed black, native American, and white ancestry. Strict laws about miscegenation, segregation, schooling, and other areas of racialized civil society, were enforced through violence in order to protect the purity of America’s “white racial stock.”

These racially ambiguous people knew that to “pass” into whiteness was to move up the class and racial hierarchy. This was a common story in the black community, but also extended to Melungeons, the Mississippi Chinese, and others who in acts of racial realpolitik ran away from blackness in order to secure some share of whiteness as a type of property.

Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden‘s last paragraph is a potpourri of historical flattening and misrepresentation.

Understanding the Racial Identity Development of Multiracial Young Adults through their Family, Social and Environmental Experiences

Catholic University of America
2012
184 pages

Lisa Sechrest-Ehrhardt

A DISSERTATION Submitted to the faculty of the National Catholic School of Social Service of The Catholic University of America
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This study explored the development of healthy racial identity in multiracial young adults.  The design of the study was qualitative with a constructivist epistemology, and data were analyzed via the grounded theory methods of constant comparative analysis.  The conceptual frameworks grounding the study were Symbolic Interaction theory, identity theory, and racial identity theory.  The sample of 15 participants was drawn from a larger non-random purposive sample by their scoring in the “ethnic identity achieved” range on the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). The researcher engaged the participants in one to two hour face-to-face semi structured interviews in which she explored their lived experiences to understand their perspectives of the process of developing a healthy multiracial identity and to understand their ability to border cross. Border crossings are strategies used by individuals in their daily interactions with others and within the environment of multiple groups.  They include having the ability to carry multiple racial and or ethnic perspectives simultaneously, and being able to shift one’s racial identity with regards to the situational context or the environment (Miville et al., 2005; Root, 1996). From the analysis of the interview data 119 categories emerged that were collapsed into eight subcategories and ultimately three core categories.  From the core categories, three themes emerged: (1) an early supportive environment provided a stable foundation that allowed participants the opportunity to figure out who they are; (2) a strong multiracial identity was facilitated through the frequent challenge in growing up of the ubiquitous question from others, “What are you?”; and, (3) Those with a healthy multiracial identity have developed the capacity to  travel with ease across the borders of different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups of people. Participants appreciated and integrated their racial heritages. They embraced the uniqueness of being multiracial, continued to explore their racial identity, and as a result developed a whole and integrated healthy multiracial identity.

Read the entire dissertation here.

How Obama became black

The Washington Post
2011-06-14

David Maraniss

He was too dark in Indonesia. A hapa child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “Invisible Man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published June 19. These excerpts trace the young Obama’s arc toward black identity, through his words and experiences, and through the eyes of those who knew him best.

“How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?”

Everything about Barry seemed different to his classmates and first-grade teacher, Israela Pareira, at S.D. Katolik Santo Fransiskus in Jakarta, Indonesia. He came in wearing shoes and socks, with long pants, a black belt and a white shirt neatly tucked in. The other boys wore short pants above the knee, and they often left their flip-flops or sandals outside the classroom and studied in bare feet. Barry was the only one who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia that first year. Ms. Pareira was the only one who understood his English. He was a fast learner, but in the meantime some boys communicated with him in a sign language they jokingly called “Bahasa tarzan.”…

Read the entire article here.

American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama

HarperCollins
2012-06-19
400 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 9780061999864; ISBN10: 0061999865

Rachel L. Swarns, Correspondent
New York Times

A remarkable history of First Lady Michelle Obama’s mixed ancestry, American Tapestry by Rachel L. Swarns is nothing less than a breathtaking and expansive portrait of America itself. In this extraordinary feat of genealogical research—in the tradition of “The Hemmingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family”—author Swarns, a respected Washington-based reporter for the New York Times, tells the fascinating and hitherto untold story of Ms. Obama’s black, white, and multiracial ancestors; a history that the First Lady herself did not know. At once epic, provocative, and inspiring, American Tapestry is more than a true family saga; it is an illuminating mirror in which we may all see ourselves.

Michelle Obama’s family saga is a remarkable, quintessentially American story—a journey from slavery to the White House in five generations. Yet, until now, little has been reported on the First Lady’s roots. Prodigiously researched, American Tapestry traces the complex and fascinating tale of Michelle Obama’s ancestors, a history that the First Lady did not even know herself. Rachel L. Swarns, a correspondent for the New York Times, brings into focus the First Lady’s black, white, and multiracial forebears, and reveals for the first time the identity of Mrs. Obama’s white great-great-great-grandfather—a man who remained hidden in her lineage for more than a century.

American Tapestry illuminates the lives of the ordinary people in Mrs. Obama’s family tree who fought for freedom in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; who endured the agonies of slavery, the disappointment of Reconstruction, the displacement of the Great Migration, and the horrors of Jim Crow to build a better future for their children. Swarns even found a possible link to the Jewish Reform movement.

Though it is an intimate family history, American Tapestry is also the collective chronicle of our changing nation, a nation in which racial intermingling lingers in the bloodlines of countless citizens and slavery was the crucible through which many family lines—black, white, and Native American—were forged.

Epic in scope and beautifully rendered, this is a singularly inspiring story with resonance for us all.