Mixed Race Studies

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell (Born 1921): Teaching America that black was beautiful.

The Lives They Lived
The New York Times Magazine
2014-12-25

Touré

DeVore-Mitchell during her modeling days. Photograph by Rupert Callender from the DeVore family archive

One day in 1946, a black woman showed up at the Vogue School of Modeling in New York, seeking to learn the trade. Her arrival caused a stir. The nascent modeling industry was as deeply segregated as America was then, and she was turned away. At the time, the Vogue School of Modeling did not accept black women. Or so it thought.

Unknown to the school, one was already enrolled: Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell. And she had no idea that Vogue was unaware. “I thought they knew what I was,” DeVore-Mitchell would tell Ebony magazine years later. She had not lied to get in; she was so light-skinned that no one thought to ask. She passed inadvertently…

Read the entire article here.

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, 92, Dies; Redefined Beauty

The New York Times
2014-03-13

Margalit Fox

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell Credit MARBL/Emory University, via Associated Press

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, a former model, agent, charm-school director and newspaper publisher who almost single-handedly opened the modeling profession to African-Americans, and in so doing expanded public understanding of what American beauty looks like, died on Feb. 28 in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death was announced on March 6 on the floor of the House of Representatives by Sanford D. Bishop Jr., Democrat of Georgia. At her death, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was the publisher emeritus of The Columbus Times, a black newspaper in Columbus, Ga., which she ran from the 1970s until her retirement about five years ago.

Long before the phrase “Black is beautiful” gained currency in the 1960s, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was preaching that ethos by example.

In New York in the 1940s — an age when modeling schools, and modeling jobs, were overwhelmingly closed to blacks — she helped start the Grace del Marco Modeling Agency and later founded the Ophelia DeVore School of Self-Development and Modeling. The enterprises, which served minorities, endured for six decades…

…“Black has always been beautiful,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell once said. “But you had to hide it to be a model.”

In the late 1930s, when Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell began her career as one of the first black models in the United States, she found work partly by hiding her own heritage. But in her case, the hiding was done entirely through inadvertence.

Emma Ophelia DeVore was born on Aug. 12, 1921, in Edgefield, S.C., one of 10 children of John Walter DeVore, a building contractor, and the former Mary Emma Strother, a schoolteacher.

As a girl, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell, whose family was of African, Cherokee, French and German descent, was educated in segregated Southern schools; she received additional instruction “in dancing, piano and all the other things in the arts that parents gave you to make you a lady,” as she told Ebony magazine in 2012…

…A beauty with wide-set eyes, Ophelia DeVore had begun modeling casually as a teenager. A few years later, seeking professional training, she enrolled in the Vogue School of Modeling in New York.

It was only toward the end of her studies there, when the school refused admission to another black candidate, that she realized it had mistaken her, with her light skin, for white.

“I didn’t know that they didn’t know,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell said in the Ebony interview. “I thought they knew what I was.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Who’s Passing for Who?

Genius
2014-12-22 (Originally written in 1956)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

In this short story, written in 1956, Hughes plays with the idea of race as a social construct. Considering the American “one-drop rule,” which meant if you had at least 1/33 African ancestry you were black, the narrator is puzzled by whether a couple in Harlem that he meets is a white couple passing as a black couple passing for white or a black couple who can pass for white. The joke is on the narrator.

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help. Usually, to tell the truth, they have nothing to help with, except their company–which is often appallingly dull.

Some members of the Negro race seem very well able to put up with it, though, in these uplifting years. Such was Caleb Johnson, colored social worker, who was always dragging around with him some nondescript white person or two, inviting them to dinner, showing them Harlem, ending up at the Savoy–much to the displeasure of whatever friends of his might be out that evening for fun, not sociology.

Friends are friends and, unfortunately, overearnest uplifters are uplifters–no matter what color they may be. If it were the white race that was ground down instead of Negroes, Caleb Johnson would be one of the first to offer Nordics the sympathy of his utterly inane society, under the impression that somehow he would be doing them a great deal of good.

You see, Caleb, and his white friends, too, were all bores. Or so we, who lived in Harlem’s literary bohemia during the “Negro Renaissance” thought. We literary ones considered ourselves too broad-minded to be bothered with questions of color. We liked people of any race who smoked incessantly, drank liberally, wore complexion and morality as loose garments, and made fun of anyone who didn’t do likewise. We snubbed and high-hatted any Negro or white luckless enough not to understand Gertrude Stein, Ulysses, Man Ray, the theremin, Jean Toomer, or George Anthell. By the end of the 1920’s Caleb was just catching up to Dos Passos. He thought H.G. Wells good….

Read the entire short story here.

Why I Passed For White

The Archipelago: Stories about community, identity, and the ongoing quest to belong.
Medium
2014-12-19

Shawna Ayoub Ainslie

I erased my own heritage to feel safe. I hope to teach my children not to do the same.

When I was 16, I started letting people believe that I was white.

In 1996, my family relocated upward from the Bible Belt. We moved from the southwest corner of Arkansas to the Midwest. At sixteen, I experienced a new definition of self — which, for me, meant shedding my ethnic heritage and the abuse that came with it. My coming of age was more than an exit from youthful innocence. It was an escape.

Innocence, in this case, is a misleading term. The naivete that defines the wishful, carefree young was lost to me much earlier than 16. It began at the age of 9, the fourth year in a row I was assigned the part of Native American in the school Thanksgiving play because I “looked the part.” That year, I stood onstage dressed in a paper-bag-cum-leather-vest with an Indian-American boy. Both of us sported handmade headbands with oversized feathers. Our single spoken line was accompanied by the arcing of one folded arm upward. “How!” I shouted, having practiced the line with aplomb. “How,” my cohort whispered, barely gumming the word and ducking his head as though ashamed. Our white peers were grouped together at the Pilgrim’s table, waiting to take the giant ears of paper mache corn we handed them.

It was weeks later, during International Day, when we were both paraded once more onstage, when I began to understand my fellow actor resistance to the role of food-bearing native. After all, even though Native Americans had saved the Pilgrims with offerings of corn and hunting instruction, the Pilgrims were the true saviors; they came bearing God and civility to the dark-skinned heathen.

That International Day, we were exhorted to wear our ethnic best, and so we came to school in costume. Indian-American boy, Arab-American girl, dressed in pantaloons and tunic and ornate housedress. I came with jeans and a t-shirt in my bag because those were the items most comfortable. But the boy, whose name I cannot recall, had only his waist-tie pants. After we were questioned onstage about our weird, foreign at-home customs, we exited stage right. Just off the stage in the cafeteria’s corner, the tie must have let go. My peer lost his pants. They slipped soundlessly down around his ankles. He turned, his brown eyes meeting mine. He was not panicked. He said nothing. He simply looked resigned.

I had shifted to block him from view, but a redhead named Ashley caught sight of the spectacle. He ran toward the dispersing classes to notify everyone he knew. “Shawna was there!” he squealed. “Shawna saw it.”

Here it was: the moment that could elevate me beyond the nickname Gorilla — a nod to my hairy, Arab legs. The boy was not my friend, but neither were the children who clamored around me. I looked back into the boy’s brown eyes. He waited.

“Did you see his underwear?” someone asked. “Are they as weird as his clothes?”

In that moment I found a kinship in the brownness the boy and I shared. I squared my feet. “It didn’t happen,” I said. And then, “Ashley is lying.”

Aside from my body hair, the thing I was most known for was honesty. The story was deflated. Ashley narrowed his eyes at me. I had made an enemy. I looked around. The brown boy was gone.

I wish I could remember his name. I have thought about assigning one to him, but it feels disingenuous. Of the peers that litter my history, he is one who deserves a label other than ethnicity. Especially as he ushered me out of my innocence into an awareness of my physical self and its perception. Still, he remains nameless, like so many of our other dark-skinned brothers…

Read the entire article here.

English 49, “Whiteness” and Racial Difference

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Spring 1997

Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature

A look at the conflicted ways in which “racial” identities and differences have been constructed in past and contemporary cultures, especially in the U.S. Topics given emphasis in the syllabus include why saying “race doesn’t matter” is not enough; how a new debates about the history of race have changed American Studies and feminist studies; how European immigrants to the U.S. became “white” and with what benefits and what costs; how popular culture can both resist and perpetuate racist culture; and an introduction to issues of “passing,” multi-racial identity, and recovering a multiracial past. The format of the class will include both lecture and student-led discussion.

For more information, click here.

EN-255 Passing Narratives

Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
Fall Semester

Passing narratives investigate how the boundaries of identity can be reimagined. Most often depicting racial passing (when a person “passes for” someone of another race), these narratives also can be about performing another gender or sexual identity. In this course, we will examine a variety of texts that treat different forms of passing. Beginning with a slave narrative in which a black woman “passes” as a white man to escape slavery, we will trace the evolution of this trope through American literature and film. From traditional passing novels that use the form to protest racial injustice to recent texts that challenge continued discrimination against of other marginalized groups in contemporary culture, we will explore topics such as biological essentialism vs. the social construction of identity; authenticity and performance; social and legal forms of identity categorization and boundary maintenance; the role of literature in social reform; and many others. We will examine these topics through frequent in-class close reading and response writing in addition to formal essays, and presentations meant to deepen your understanding of selected texts.

Ming Wong’s Imitations

Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World
Volume 9, Number 2 (2014) Special Topic: Contemporary Remediations of Race and Ethnicity in German Visual Cultures
32 pages

Barbara Mennel, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

The article “Ming Wong’s Imitations” analyzes the installation Life of Imitation, created by visual artist Ming Wong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Life of Imitation restages a key scene from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, in which the African American character Annie visits her daughter Sarah Jane who is passing as white. In Wong’s restaging three male actors from different ethnic groups in Singapore reenact the scene, but switch roles at every cut. The article traces the shifts from the original literary source, Fannie Hurst’s 1933 Imitation of Life to John M. Stahl’s 1934 film of the same title to Sirk’s version. Emphasizing melodrama’s organizing structure of “too late,” I show how Sirk shifted the melodramatic emphasis from the white mother/daughter pair’s romantic conflict to the African American mother/daughter pair’s racial conflict. Addressing the question whether such a shift implies a progressive politics, I turn to the contentious discussion of Sirk’s earlier film work in Weimar and Nazi Germany, pointing to ideological and formal continuities.

In contrast to these significant shifts in the different instantiations of the text, I propose that the different versions share the subordination and disavowal of ethnic difference in order to construct a racial binary, which then becomes the setting of the passing narrative organized around the ‘tragic mulatta’. I illustrate my argument with the instances of ethnic passing of the writers, directors, and actors involved in the different versions of the text. However, I also show the appeal of racial passing narratives can have for a gay camp imagination, identification, and appropriation. I conclude the article with a discussion of Wong’s double move in Life of Imitation of returning ethnic bodies that have been excised from the original diegesis to their significance and appropriating the gendered melodrama through cross-dressing. After a survey of the term “remediation” as it emerged from the discussion of new media, I show that Wong’s piece belongs to a group of works by visual artists who remake film in digital media in the environment of the art space. I conclude with reading the effect of rotating the actors at each cut, which does not subvert spatial and temporal continuity, but challenges spectators’ perception of ethnicity and gender, and produces unstable identities.

Read the entire article here.

On Being Non-White, But Passing Terribly Well

Everyday Feminism
2014-05-08

Patricia Gutierrez
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

“Psst… Hey, Patty! You speak Spanish? Ignoring me? Hey! You speak Spanish?”

P.E., third period, seventh grade.

Every time Ricardo saw me, he would ask me the same question.

At first, I would answer yes, but he would always get me back with a “Nah, prove it. Say something.” I never did.

I would often imagine myself yelling, “¡Que sí, güey! ¿Ya cuántas veces te tengo que decir, pues? Pinche metiche,” but in reality, my face would blush and my hands would sweat in frustration such so that I’d slip while trying to do a pushup.

I stopped talking to most kids at school when I moved to a new district at five (also when I was given a “new” name by my white teacher who pronounced it wrong; I didn’t have the voice to correct anyone until two years ago), and I didn’t really start again until high school. I wasn’t going to open up for Ricardo.

But Ricardo wasn’t the first person to demand proof, to demand to know why my last name and my appearance didn’t make sense to them (“Pues, es que mi familia es de Nayarit y Jalisco.” “Aaah, bueno, por eso.”), and he wouldn’t be the last….

Read the entire article here.

The Talk: After Ferguson, a Shaded Conversation About Race

The New York Times
2014-12-13

Dana Canedy, Senior Editor

LIKE so many African-American parents, I had rehearsed “the talk,” that nausea-inducing discussion I needed to have with my son about how to conduct himself in the presence of the police. I was prepared for his questions, except for one.

“Can I just pretend I’m white?”

Jordan was born to African-American parents, but recessive genes being what they are, he has very fair skin and pale blue eyes. I am caramel brown, and since his birth eight years ago people have mistaken me for his nanny.

When I asked why he would want to “pass” for white, I struggled with how to respond to his answer.

“Because it’s safer,” Jordan replied. “They won’t hurt me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racecraft: Stories of Racial Passing

Los Angeles Review of Books
2014-12-05

Lucy McKeon, Writer and Photographer
New York, New York

THE VERY NOTION of racial “passing” implies a test. Those who believed clear racial categorization was possible might test for race by measuring physical traits to indicate “blood purity”: slight physical traits that could be identified, such as the half-moon of a nail bed or the whites of ones eyes. In apartheid South Africa, the “pencil test” was devised: categorizing people based on whether a pencil would remain or fall from their hair. Physical markers were used to fix and control whole futures.

“White people were so stupid about such things,” says Irene, the narrator of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). “They usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth.”

To pass the faulty test of white scrutiny is not difficult; Larsen’s Passing, and other 18th to 20th century fiction and 20th century film, work to demonstrate that categorization by race relies on arbitrary rules and unsound logic — proving, in other words, the falsely naturalized or socially constructed nature of “race” itself. As Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs reminds us in her recent cultural history A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, the gains and losses of racial passing — when someone from one racial group “passes,” or is accepted, as another — were historically contingent, like “race” itself. Indeed, one’s semblance could rarely be taken as trustworthy evidence. “Skin color and physical appearance were usually the least reliable factors,” writes Hobbs, “whereas one’s associations and relationships were more predictive” of who was deemed white and who was not. If white people can’t actually tell who is white and who isn’t, whiteness is exposed as simply the external perception of being white — the privilege, power, and civic membership afforded to someone recognized as such. This is white supremacy in practice.

Michael Yudell’s Race Unmasked examines the history of the concept of biological race — in large part tied to the history of genetics, which “at its founding was inseparable from eugenics theories” — in order to show that race is “neither a static biological certainty nor a reflection of our genes. Instead, race is a historical and cultural phenomenon.” We’ve known this, of course. But Yudell’s recent book provides scientific documentation of the process of “racecraft,” a term coined by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in their 2012 book by the same name: the “mental terrain” where our deep and pervasive belief in race as meaningful is conjured, then ritualized into reality. “Race” comes to explain social effects like poverty, as witchcraft might explain failing crops. What’s real is not “race,” but the ideology of racism: the belief in “race” as a tool with which to rationalize cause and consequence.

In this way, while both fictive and biographical representations of passing demonstrate the absurdity of “race,” they also emphasize the very real effects of racial categorization. From the point of view of those passing, Hobbs writes,

race was neither strictly a social construction nor a biological fact. The line between black and white was by no means imaginary; crossing it had profound, life-changing consequences. Race was quite real to those who lived with it, not because of skin color or essentialist notions about biology, but because it was social and experiential, because it involved one’s closest relationships and one’s most intimate communities.

Passing, in other words, demonstrates how “race” is both socially constructed and, as experienced, extremely meaningful.

Hobbs focuses on the experience of great loss in her cultural history of passing. As she points out, “Historians and literary scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity.” But “racial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not.”…

Read the entire article here.