Mixed Race Studies

Spinning on Margins: An Analysis of Passing as Communicative Phenomenon

Queen: a journal of rhetoric and power
Special Issue: Rehtorics of identity: Place, Race, Sex and the Person (January 2005)
From the conference held from 2005-01-20 through 2005-01-22 at the University of Redlands
21 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Acts of black-to-white racial passing in the United States represent a struggle between self-identity and the social structures into which one is born. From a historical perspective, passing is a strategy of representation through which light-skinned black Americans attempt(ed) to reconcile “two unreconciled ideals:” their limited opportunities as black people in a segregated society with their idealized life goals as full American citizens in the pre-civil rights era (DuBois, 1903; Gandy, 1998). In other words, passing is a strategy employed by many light-skinned black Americans to resolve being excluded from the general white world of social activity by “the vast veil;” the physical, legal, psychological, and social obstacles structurally embedded between blacks and whites (DuBois, 1903).

This individual paper employs Structuration Theory, legal precedent, literature and rhetorical analysis to respond to the following specific interrogations: (1) is it possible to develop a vocabulary about “passing,” which is an activity based on nonverbal communication and physicality and enshrouded in a code of silence? And, in a broader sense, (2) how do acts of passing themselves become communicative behaviors that express identity?

This three-pronged analysis of the passing phenomenon will work to call the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question. First, Giddens’s Structuration Theory will explain that passers note a contextual diversity/dissonance at the macro level between the general white world of social activity and the general black world of social activity. Second, a rhetorical analysis of legal precedent will highlight America’s investment in race as the basis for defining and partaking in social and material privileges that become routine and critical aspects of day-to-day life. Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and People v. Dean are pivotal points in tracing whiteness from “color to race to status to property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). Additionally, these cases address the debate of social versus legal whiteness as the grounds for constituting full participation in society. Third, available literature, including narratives written by enslaved Africans along with novels, diaries, and memoirs from the Harlem Renaissance, recounts tales of passing and the emotional and social tolls paid in the process (Harris, 1993; Johnson, 1912; Hughes, 1933; Williams, 1991; Ifekwunigwe, 1999). Rhetorical analysis of this literature will uncover the tropes of a vocabulary of passing and reveal race as a “fantasy theme” and social resource that individuals who are not in the mainstream of white America utilize to attain economic, political, and personal fulfillment.

Read the entire article here.

From The Birth of a Nation to Havoc: The Evolution of Traditional Blackface to Modern Racial Passing in U.S. Cinema

Pennsylvania State University
August 2009
122 pages

Dorian Randall

A Thesis in Media Studies by Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

Race is a complicated and debatable term in the United States today. Film is one venue in which the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of race is challenged, particularly with representations of minstrelsy and episodes of racial passing that also evolve into performance of class distinctions. Through textual and rhetorical analysis, I chronicled the evolution of minstrelsy as a form of racial passing through a cinematic lens and demonstrated how the racial/class performance creates multiracial identity in the films’ characters. The purpose of this research is to add to the continuing analysis and investigation of racial passing and minstrelsy by evaluating the construction of multiracial identity in monoracial characters that perform a race other than their own in the films under analysis. This study also reveals how the definition of race evolved through class performance as race and class are heavily related terms.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Literature Review Part I: A Brief History of Slavery
• 3. Literature Review Part II: Minstrelsy and Racial Passing
• 4. Burnt Cork Cinema: From Black and White to Color
• 5. Fade into White: Passing Films
• 6. Class Act: Race/Class Films
• 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Off white

The Indian Express
New Delhi, India
2012-05-19

Census data confirms America’s enduring ability to bring the world home

The United States has crossed a demographic tipping point, driven by changes in immigration, fertility and mortality patterns. By now, more than half the babies born in the US belong to a racial or ethnic minority. The US Census Bureau has confirmed what was clear ever since the 2000 census, where 49.8 per cent of infants under one were members of a minority — more than a quarter was Hispanic, 13.6 per cent blacks and 4.2 per cent Asian. Almost one in 20 births was a mixed-race baby. Of course, this counting is complicated. For instance, many mixed-race people and Latinos consider themselves white. However, it is clear that the United States of America is set to look markedly different than it did a few decades ago…

Read the entire article here.

Rodney King juror: ‘My father was black’

Ventura County Star
Camarillo, California
2012-04-28

Gretchen Wenner, Staff Reporter

SQUAW VALLEY — Juror No. 8 from the Rodney King beating trial has always heard the 12-member panel described as either all white or as having no blacks.
 
Now, he wants the public to know that’s not the whole story: His father was a black man.
 
“Nobody’s ever guessed that I was black,” Henry King Jr. told The Star.
 
From the get-go, the media made a big thing about the jury having no blacks, said King, a 69-year-old retiree living in Fresno County.

“It made you feel like they didn’t think we could come out with a fair verdict because we were supposed to be an all-white jury,” he said…

…”There are a few things about me that people don’t know,” he initially said, then choked back tears before saying his father was black.
 
It’s something he didn’t share with other jurors during the trial and doesn’t recall sharing when they occasionally socialized afterward. Nor had he talked about it with a reporter.
 
“Forty years ago, you really didn’t say that you were part black,” said King. “Now, I’m proud of it.”
 
When he applied last year to be on the Fresno County Grand Jury, one of the first things he told them was that his father was black.
 
“They thought I was joking,” he said.
 
During interviews on the phone and at his home on 5 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, King shared family photos and thoughts on his background and the trial. Both of his parents have since died.
 
“I look pretty white,” said King, whose friends call him Hank. “If you looked at me, you wouldn’t know I had black blood in me.”
 
His eyes are blue; his skin is light.
 
King variously described himself as part black, as having black blood and occasionally as black or mixed-race.
 
“I don’t know if you would say mulatto or what,” he said at one point.
 
In his younger years, he didn’t often think about his racial background…

Read the entire article here.

‘Beautiful Hybrids’: Caroline Gurrey’s Photographs of Hawai‘i’s Mixed-race Children

History of Photography
Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012)
pages 184-198
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654947

Anne Maxwell, Associate Professor of English
University of Melbourne, Australia

In the early years of the twentieth century the Hawaiian-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey produced a much praised set of the photographs of Hawai‘i’s ‘mixed race’ children. Critics have noted that stylistically Gurrey’s photographs belong to the pictorialist school and possibly even to the high art style of the Photo-Seccessionists, however research into her background and life, and the contexts in which these photographs were produced and consumed, suggests that if we want a fuller understanding of both Gurrey’s intentions and these photographs’ historical importance, we should also take note of the part they played in the burgeoning eugenics movement and indigenous Hawaiians’ reactions to American imperialism.

According to Naomi Rosenblum, professional women photographers did not emerge until the 1880s, following a shift in attitudes concerning female education and employment opportunities. When this occurred, there was a veritable explosion of female interest in the medium so that bv the early twentieth century not only were there thousands of amateur women photographers but the numbers taking up photography (or professional and artistic reasons were also large. Historians of photography have investigated the achievements of these early women photographers, with the result that over the last decade a rough consensus as to who were the most important has emerged. Not surprisingly, most of those singled out are from the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany, where the technology and the professional and social networks supporting early photography were most advanced. Missing are the professional women photographers who lived and worked in the smaller western and non-western countries adjacent or peripheral to these larger ones. Although fewer in number, these women warrant historical and critical attention, if only because the limited institutional support available in these places meant they had to labour that much harder to achieve recognition.

One such is the Hawai‘i-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey (whose name before marriage was Haskins), who was active during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Gurrey gained limited critical acclaim while she was alive, but because of her Hawaiian location, and because she was obliged to abandon her artistic ambitions for photojournalism, her name has now virtually sunk into oblivion. Of the few contemporary critics who know of Gurrey’s achievements, most agree that her most important works are the artistic portraits of Hawai‘i’s…

Read or purchase the article here.

Contemporary US multiple heritage couples, individuals, and families: Issues, concerns, and counseling implications

Counselling Psychology Quarterly
Volume 25, Issue 2, (June 2012)
Special Issue: Race, Culture, and Mental Health: Metissage, Mestizaje, Mixed “Race”, and Beyond
pages 99-112
DOI: 10.1080/09515070.2012.674682

Mark Kenney, Adjunct Professor
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

Kelley Kenney, Professor of Counseling & Human Services
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

This article introduces the special edition by providing an overview of how policies and attitudes have influenced the experience of multiple heritage couples, individuals, and families in the American context. This history is linked to the developmental tasks of multiracial individuals and families in contemporary context. This paper also discusses the counseling implications emphasizing the importance of delivering culturally competent and sensitive services.

Introduction

Multiple heritage couples and individuals historically have been the subject of controversy and scrutiny. Myths and stereotypes that pervade our society suggest that individuals who couple interracially are dysfunctional (Yancey, 2002); are attempting to make a statement (Root, 2001); or have ulterior motives for doing so (Wardle, 1992, 1999). Motives speculated upon include quests for the exotic, sexual curiosity and promiscuity, economic and social status or achievement, domination, potential citizenship, rebellion against society or family, low sell-esteem, or racial self-hatred (DaCosta, 2007; Karis, 2003: Root, 1992; Spickard, 1989; Yancey, 2002); that persons of color are more willing to accept children of interracial unions than are white people (Wardle, 1992, 1999); and that the difficulties faced by interracial individuals and families are based on race (Root, 2001: Wehrly, 1996). Myths and stereotypes about multiple heritage individuals suggest that they are doomed to a life of rejection, and confusion about who they are (Wardle, 1999; Yancey, 2002).

This paper examines contemporary multiple heritage couples, individuals, and families in the US; the salient issues and concerns that have historically confronted this population; and the counseling implications of which those working with this growing population need to be aware. In this article, we address multiple heritage individuals, couples, and families drawing on a literature that uses multiple terms to identify them “Interracial couples” are defined as partners, married or not, of a different racial background (Root, 1992; Spickard, 1989). “Multiracial individuals” are defined as individuals whose biological parents or whose lineage are of two or more different racial backgrounds (Funderburg, 1994; Gibbs, 1989; Root, 1992)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Jean Toomer, Mulatto and Modernist: the Fused Race and Fused Form of Cane

Oklahoma State University
May 1997
76 pages

Rhonda Lea McClellan

Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS

Preface

In the fall of 1993, I enrolled in Dr. Leavell’s modern/contemporary literature course that examined familiar “novels” under a different form, the short story cycle. We discussed how familiiar texts, like Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, and Hemingway’s In Our Time, labeled by critics as novels, could be viewed under the definitions of a different genre. As we analyzed this genre, I thought how vulnerable art and artists are at the hands of critics who define pieces based on literary traditions. Chagrined, I thought of the pieces of literature that I could have misread.

When we finally turned the pages of Jean Toomer’s Cane and examined the pioneering strategies of this modern writer, the consequences of misleading critiques became apparent to me. Rarely do we read of the Harlem Renaissance without seeing the name Jean Toomer. Accordingly, scholars contend that Toomer contributed to the awakening of the African-American experience in the 1920s and that his Cane secured his place in the African American canon.

But after reading biographical sketches, I found that Toomer, as an orphaned mulatto, rarely felt as if he belonged to any racial category. Moving between both black and white, rich and poor, young and old, Toomer knew little about securing his social position. He defined race as a social institution, an unjust categorization of Americans, creating a prejudice and fragmented society. Toomer, therefore, refused to be placed within these confines. As a result of my reading, I believe that Toomer’s social “drifting” is his personal illustration that Americans should not feel restricted to social categories and that Americans do not lead isolated lives but actually share a common experience-alienation. In fact, as an ostracized young man, he found only one way to find peace within his world, and that peace came from writing. His alienation gave Toomer an objective perspective that lead to his social and literary philosophies.

From Dr. Leavell’s emphasis on the importance of literary form and theme, I realized that critics fail to understand Cane’s structure relative to its theme. If critics did not apprehend Toomer’s racial ideology presented in Cane, how could they interpret the significance of the text’s structure? A man who would not be confined to one race could not limit his art to conventions of one culture. In Cane, Toomer fuses the art forms of the African-American with the European.

I see Toomer, a man eventually marginalized because of his racial ambiguity, creating a text, Cane, that follows the traditions of American literary pursuits. In the tradition of Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman, Toomer attempts to create an American character and structure. Toomer’s mulatto represents modern man, and he presents these isolated characters in a modern, fragmented society. He fuses his racial ideology into Cane’s structure. Like its multi-racial characters, Cane’s structure depends on the aesthetic conventions of many races. Toomer’s literary innovations with form and theme make him a Modernist. Because of his ethnicity, however, Toomer found his text as much on the periphery as himself.

After Toomer voiced his racial views and his literary aspirations, scholars would contend that Toomer “deserted his people.” I maintain that readers misinterpret Cane’s projection of his mixed-race characters and the significance of its multi-cultural form. Critics have not fully understood Toomer or Cane. Toomer’s views blur lines that critics fail to reevaluate.

After examining Toomer and his text, I can appreciate the complexity of a man who refused categorization and a book that evades literary classification. In the first chapter, I will place Toomer in American literary traditions and provide biographical details that influenced his social views. In the second chapter, I will discuss Toomer’s racial and social ideology and its impact on Cane. In the third chapter, I will focus on the theme and structure of Cane’s prose. In the fourth chapter, my focus will shift to the merging of Cane’s poetic theme and structure. Opposing other critics who have placed Toomer in the African-American canon, I propose that Jean Toomer, who was influenced by white Modernist writers, such as Anderson and Frank, experiments with a national character-the mulatto-and a national form-a structure blending the art forms of the African American and European American-and writes within the broader traditions of American literature.

Read the entire thesis here.

Is the Tanning of America Only Skin Deep?

The Huffington Post
2012-05-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official: The United States is officially “tan.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s first population estimate by age, race, ethnicity, and sex since the 2010 Census, “50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010.”

As expected, media flurry ensued. The Associated Press was among the first outlets to pick up the story reporting, “For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S.” USA Today noted the nation’s changing complexion and described the Census Bureau’s report as “a sign of how swiftly the USA is becoming a nation of younger minorities and older whites.” And according to the New York Times, “such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive.”

Now that the moment is here we must reckon with it. Today’s Census statement marks a social milestone for a nation that has struggled with issues of diversity, privilege, and power. But, as I suggest in my forthcoming book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, the tanning of America might be only skin deep. Or, putting it differently: Is the U.S. passing as “tan”?…

…Here’s why you should care. Because looking at tomorrow’s “tanning” generation in demographic terms only subtly promotes them as the chosen ones who can and will dismantle racism that took centuries to build. When we take this perspective we are shifting the responsibility of solving institutional and structural racism off those of us who were born before July 1, 2011 and off our legal and social histories. This is not only unfair — it’s unrealistic. Predicting the demise of racism by the rising number of nonwhite births is probably not the best way to fulfill our desire for a more just society. Wouldn’t the present-day elimination of disparities in income, employment, health care, education, crime, punishment and family structure for this new generation (as well as their parents) be more accurate measures?…

Read the entire article here.

To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Twentieth Century Literature
Volume 46, Number 1 (Spring 2000)
pages 1-19

Catherine Gunther Kodat, Professor of English and American Studies
Hamilton College, Clinton, New York

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic–and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.

—Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (Ecrits 4)

The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized. This holds true as well for art-works. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always turn one side toward society, the domination they internalized also radiated externally.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 17-18

My concern is solely with art. What am I?

—Jean Toomer to John McClure, July 22, 1922 (qtd. in Kerman 26)

The temptation to read Jean Toomer’s Cane as something of a modernist experiment in autobiography is strong, and scholars who do so fall into two camps: those who see the work as a tribute to the discovery of a true self, and those who read it as testimony to the failure of an attempt to make that discovery. Critics in the first camp take as their starting point Toomer’s own compelling story of the genesis of Cane: trapped in genteel poverty in Washington, D.C., caring for two ailing grandparents, feverishly working to train himself as a writer, he accepts a temporary job in the fall of 1921 at an industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia, and there, exposed for the first time in his life to the Southern African American rural folk, discovers his creative voice. Those biographical readers of Cane who stress this flowering of Toomer’s creativity see the book as a lyrical celebration of rediscovered African American roots; content is stressed over form, as we are encouraged to read past Toomer’s style to uncover the racial, psychosocial meaning beneath. The poem in part 1, “Song of the Son,” is held to bear a truth at once personal and aesthetic: before he could become a great artist, Toomer—an olive-skinned young man who passed for white in college (Kerman 63)—first had to become black. Cane thus is cast as the mirror of Jean Toomer’s soul, reflecting to him a moment, however brief, of true racial vision and, it follows, great artistic achievement. The aesthetic importance of Cane thus lies less in its formal and stylistic experiments than in its unapologetic, nonbourgeois choice of the Southern black peasant as hero.

Events in Toomer’s life subsequent to Cane can seem to bolster this critical argument. In 1923, when Horace Liveright urged Toomer to stress his “colored blood” in the brief biography Boni & Liveright planned to use in publicizing Cane, Toomer objected: “My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine” (qtd. in Kerman 110-11). This first link in a long chain of racial disclaimers climaxed in the 1932 pamphlet “A Fact and Some Fictions,” in which Toomer wrote: “As for being a Negro, this of course I am not—neither biologically nor socially” (qtd. in Benson 43). Toomer “had considered the matter and was determined to erase, as much as possible, his connections to the Afro-American experience,” notes Nellie Y. McKay, concluding that this rejection had debilitating artistic consequences (199). The sense of wholeness and creative well-being that flowed from Toomer’s embrace of rural blackness evaporated as the author sought a “raceless,” philosophical (as opposed to a esthetic) unity of spirit. His writings became increasingly dry and didactic, and the vast bulk remained unpublished in his lifetime.

Thus, while Cane is seen as a pinnacle of achieved wholeness, a moment of aesthetic racial truth, Toomer himself is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly modern incarnation of “double consciousness“: the racially alienated man. The second group of biographical critics stresses this apparently divided nature of Toomer’s psyche and, far from seeing Cane as a unified, lyrical expression of race spirit, argues for a view of the work’s generic indeterminacy and fragmented formal properties as aesthetic embodiments of Toomer’s riven self. Alan Golding, for example, argues that “Toomer’s drive to make the pieces of Cane balance or cohere enacts on the formal level his struggle to reconcile both the contradictory spirits of North and South and the black and white within himself” (198). In a formulation that harkens back to W. E. B. DuBois’s articulation, in The Souls of Black Folk, of “double consciousness,” Golding writes: “Cane shows Toomer in 1923 intellectually an American and emotionally a black” (200).  In this view, the mirror of Cane is no longer whole but splintered, reflecting a fragmented vision of the self that interrogates–rather than celebrates–categories of racial identity and difference and the aesthetic practices that serve to elaborate those categories. In this emphasis of form over content, Cane is usually no longer seen as primarily a black text but a modern text, in the traditional, “universal” sense of the term. This universalizing approach has had some predictable effects: in two thoughtful essays, Rudolph P. Byrd has wondered whether Cane should be read as part of the African American literary tradition at all…

Read the entire article here.

‘Brother Mine’ highlights unique relationships

The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper
Rochester, Michigan
2011-02-08

Ryan Hegedus

Reading other peoples’ mail can land you in serious trouble with the government.
 
Or, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer, it can land you a book deal.
 
Pfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland University, is the author of “Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, a back-and-forth account of over 120 letters between the two in the 1920s.”
 
Toomer, a young black author, began writing to Frank, an established white writer in New York, and the book details the unique friendship between the two.
 
“Dr. Pfeiffer’s work provides an important tool for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank,” said associate history professor and chair of the history department, Karen Miller. “Both Toomer and Frank were participants in the conflict over the construction of racial identity. Their correspondence helps us to understand how the debates over race worked themselves into friendships.”
 
In the summer of 1993, Pfeiffer was deciding on the topic of her dissertation at Yale University, and ended up at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the country’s best resources for African-American literature. The opportunity gave her the chance to do research in the primary archives.
 
It was at Beinecke that she decided on the topic of race passing.
 
Race passing was a “hot topic” in American literature at the turn of the century, Pfeiffer explained, where people who were legally defined as black because of previous generations, were actually light enough to pass for a white person.
 
“These people would take on a new identity and pass for white,” Pfeiffer said. “They would have this better opportunity as a white person than they would have as a black person, but then there would be all of this guilt and sense of loss because they’d have to leave their families. That’s really what my dissertation was about — about stories of characters who ‘pass.’”…

Read the entire article here.