Mixed Race Studies

Zoe: That — that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black — bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood; those seven bright drops give me love like yours — hope like yours — ambition like yours — life hung with passions like dewdrops on the morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing — forbidden by the laws — I’m an Octoroon!

Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Play, in Four Acts, (First Performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, December, 1859), Act I. http://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/texts/boucicault/boucicault–octaroon.html.

“It is largely through the on-screen body of the mixed-race female that racial laws have been written and mixed-race issues have been explored.  The mixed female figure was (unofficially) accepted as a body onto which white men could project and enact their sexual fantasies.  Hence the popularity of mixed girls in chorus lines at all-white American clubs, known as ‘café-au-lait cuties’ in the 1930s (5), and as performers in otherwise white films (see the careers of Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Nina Mae McKinney, Dorothy Dandridge and Fredi Washington). As Suzanne Bost observes ‘throughout popular culture and literature, debates about the nature of mixed-race identity are mapped out on the body of a woman because thinking about racial mixing inevitably leads to questions of sex and reproduction’ (6). J. E. Smyth (7) confirms that in this way, women embody the past, present and future of race relations; mixed women are thus symbolic of the histories of racial mixing and possibilities of integration and equality.” —Zélie Asava

Beti Ellerson, “Zélie Asava: mixed-race identities and representation in Irish, U.S. and French cinemas,” African Women in Cinema Blog, (February 28, 2015). http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2015/02/zelie-asava-mixed-raced-identities-and.html.

“I am your problem, Dad. You are the white father of a black daughter. You are accountable to a life that is squarely outside of the jurisdiction of the whiteness that swaddles you. I should be the problem that won’t let you come home white and blissfully unaware, but somehow this is not the case. Somehow, you feel like a white man first and my dad second. You asymmetrically toggle between the two, coming into focus as one only to obscure the other.”

Kelsey Henry, “An Open Letter to the White Fathers of Black Daughters,” bluestockings magazine, (February 23, 2015). http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/02/23/an-open-letter-to-the-white-fathers-of-black-daughters.

My mother was Martha Bell Smith, the daughter of Luanda Smith. Grandma Cindy, a fair-skinned slave, was the daughter of a slave by that slave’s master. As a teenager, she was purchased from a white family in Memphis, Tennessee. Her purchaser—a man known to my family as “Cap’n Anderson”—turned out to be my grandfather.

Ada Lois’s Mother, Martha Bell Smith Sipuel

Cap’n Anderson carried Grandma Cindy to his plantation near Belarie, Arkansas, in Chicot County. There he raised two separate families “in the same yard.” One family was by his wife, a white woman who bore him seven children, the other by my grandmother, who also bore seven. The two sets of children, each child born within two months of its counterpart, were delivered by the same black midwife. One set lived in a large white house in the middle of the plantation. The other, the group that included my mother, lived about a mile away in a small but tidy cabin.

The children of both families played together. In fact, I have heard my mother often speak of her white “brothers” and “sisters.” According to family legend, one of the white brothers became a prominent Arkansas politician, who went on to serve the state’s (all-white) voters for several years in the capitol at Little Rock. My mother told me that she once had called him when she passed through Little Rock.

According to her, his voice joyfully greeted her on the telephone. In fact, he invited her to come by the capitol for a friendly brother-sister visit; but, he added, she would have to keep her “little pickaninnies” away. Mother slammed down the phone. As far as I know, she never spoke to her brother again. His white wife sent her the newspaper clipping that announced the esteemed gentleman’s death.

Grandma Cindy’s seven children all kept the name Smith, perhaps in ironic tribute to an earlier master. The oldest was Frank, who was born a slave on his own father’s plantation in 1862, during the Civil War. The others were Kitty, Lucinda, Nan, Scott, and Gertrude. My mother, Martha Bell Smith, was the youngest, born in 1892.

My mother’s memory was that Cap’n Anderson’s black children had little use for their white father. When he would call on my grandmother, he often brought them little gifts of candy and the like, but the children all feared him. It was not that he ever beat or otherwise abused them. Instead, it seemed that they all instinctively distrusted the man and rejected what they took to be his immoral ways with their own mother. That attitude always troubled Grandma Cindy, who overlooked the circumstances of their relationship to proclaim that Cap’n Anderson was the only man that she had ever loved and the only man who ever had touched her.

When Frank was a very young man, he built a modest house and moved his mother and younger siblings off the plantation. Mother grew up in Dermott, Arkansas. The family baby, she had the best of what little was available, and she was the only one to receive any substantial education. After finishing Dermott’s public schools, she graduated from the little two-year teachers’ academy in the town and became a schoolteacher herself.

Ada Lois’s Father, Bishop Travis B. Sipuel

Stunningly beautiful, with light skin, hazel eyes, and hair that bore the slightest curl, she was teaching when she met my father, a handsome, very dark-skinned railroad man nearly fifteen years older than she. He was smitten hard and immediately. All of Grandma Cindy’s fair-skinned children married extremely dark spouses. His greatest drawback seemed to be his age. I remember her telling me that when he came courting she would tell her mother, “Mama, here comes your beau. He must be coming for you; he’s too old for me.”

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, A Matter of Black and White, The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 7-10. http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/690/a%20matter%20of%20black%20and%20white.

With reference to Brazil, as an old saying has it: “White woman for marriage, mulatto woman for fucking, Negro woman for work,” a saying in which, alongside the social convention of the superiority of the white woman and the inferiority of the black, is to be discerned a sexual preference for the mulatto.

Com relação ao Brasil, que o diga o ditado: “Branca para casar, mulata para foder, negra para trabalhar”; ditado em que se sente, ao lado do convencionalismo social da superioridade da mulher branca e da inferioridade da preta, a preferência sexual pela mulata.

Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 13-14. http://www.ucpress.edu/op.php?isbn=9780520056657.

“It is well known that horoscopes use vague statements which recipients think are more tailored than they really are (referred to as the ‘Forer effect’). Genetic ancestry tests do a similar thing, and many exaggerate far beyond the available evidence about human origins. You cannot look at DNA and read it like a book or a map of a journey. For the most part these tests cannot tell you the things they claim to – they are little more than genetic astrology.”

Tabitha Innocent, “Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing,” Sense About Science: Science and Evidence in the Hands of the Public, (March 7, 2013). 1. http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/resources/119/Sense-About-Genetic-Ancestry-Testing.pdf.

To date, the multiracial movement has helped make great strides for multiracial individuals striving to define their own racial identity and made valuable contributions to a broader conversation about how we might reconceive of race and its role in society. It has also presented a danger—in the hands of those who would use it for specific political ends—of undermining other important movements. Here, I suggest that while the ability to define one’s own identity and adoption of a more fluid understanding of race are positive developments and should be embraced or at least explored, we should be wary of immediately reconfiguring legal doctrine in response. And while the debate of how and whether racial classifications can be used by the state will rage on post-Fisher, we should protect identity from being used as a tool to advocate for any doctrinal approach. Issues of racial identity need not necessarily be perceived as incompatible with the goals of the civil rights movement. A more cautious approach would divorce the quest for identity from the use of racial classifications, allowing for individuals to define their own racial identity, but also for the state to act, when deemed appropriate, based on a broader view of racial dynamics. While a post-racial world may be the ideal for some, for now, it is also aspirational; to ignore current realities in favor of future hopes may disguise regression as progress.

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, “Undoing Race? Reconciling Multiracial Identity with Equal Protection,” California Law Review, (Volume 102, Number 5 October 2014), 1302. http://www.californialawreview.org/6undoing-race-reconciling-multiracial-identity-with-equal-protection/.

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice!”

Elliot Rodger, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” (May 23, 2014). 84. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1173619/rodger-manifesto.pdf.

“So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”

—Chris Rock

Frank Rich, “In Conversation: Chris Rock,” New York Magazine. November 30, 2014. http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/chris-rock-frank-rich-in-conversation.html.

Personally, the writer of this book would rather see his race and his civilization blotted out with the atomic bomb than to see it slowly but surely destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage and mongrelization. The destruction in either case would be inevitable—one in a flash and the other by the slow but certain process of sin, degradation, and mongrelization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, (Poplarville, Mississippi: Dream House Publishing Company, 1947). ii. https://archive.org/details/TakeYourChoice.