Mixed Race Studies

Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity

Baylor University Press
2012-08-01
285 pages
9in x 6in
5 b/w images
Hardback ISBN: 9781602583122

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications and Journalism
University of Southern California

Everybody passes. Not just racial minorities. As Marcia Dawkins explains, passing has been occurring for millennia, since intercultural and interracial contact began. And with this profound new study, she explores its old limits and new possibilities: from women passing as men and able-bodied persons passing as disabled to black classics professors passing as Jewish and white supremacists passing as white.

Clearly Invisible journeys to sometimes uncomfortable but unfailingly enlightening places as Dawkins retells the contemporary expressions and historical experiences of individuals called passers. Along the way these passers become people—people whose stories sound familiar but take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking beneath the surface, people who ultimately expose as much about our culture and society as they conceal about themselves.

Both an updated take on the history of passing and a practical account of passing’s effects on the rhetoric of multiracial identities, Clearly Invisible traces passing’s legal, political, and literary manifestations, questioning whether passing can be a form of empowerment (even while implying secrecy) and suggesting that passing could be one of the first expressions of multiracial identity in the U.S. as it seeks its own social standing.

Certain to be hailed as a pioneering work in the study of race and culture, Clearly Invisible offers powerful testimony to the fact that individual identities are never fully self-determined—and that race is far more a matter of sociology than of biology.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Passing as Passé?
• 1. Passing as Persuasion
• 2. Passing as Power
• 3. Passing as Property
• 4. Passing as Principle
• 5. Passing as Pastime
• 6. Passing as Paradox
• Conclusion: Passing as Progress?
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Peola: “There’s nothing wrong in passing. The wrong is the world that makes it necessary.”

Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life, P. F. Collier, (1933): 244.

The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop

Mother Jones
2007-11-09

Debra J. Dickerson

Suddenly, white people are fascinated by race. Good for them. Good for all of us?

If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it. A complex book on a complex issue, it’s hard to know where to begin (good reviews here, here and here).

Here’s the easy part: One Drop is about having a semi-famous father who gave you all the insulated, WASPy pampering any white girl could want but who turns out, on his deathbed, to have in fact been black, then backtracking to figure out why and how he did so. And where that leaves you in a nation where boxes must be checked and sides must be taken. Only in America could a strained conversation in your dying father’s sickroom change your race. This just in: you’re black.

Pere Broyard, Anatole, was a New Orleans Creole, as it turned out, who helped create a post-war, bohemian-intellectual Manhattan where he and his friends “didn’t know where books stopped and they began.” But the world did. The only way for the cerebral, wavy-haired Negro to claim a place in that rarified atmosphere, seduce numberless white girls, or even get a decent job, was to stop being black. The price of doing so for two generations left Broyard a twisted soul, self-eliminated from family and culture, adrift in a world which existed mostly in the minds of the trendy Communist sympathizers and slumming trust-funders who fed on each other until it was time to marry and move to Connecticut. “Our tribe of four made us seem alternately special and forsaken,” Bliss writes, “the last survivors of a dying colony or the founding members of an exclusive club.”She and her brother had almost no interaction with either side of the family, so deeply ‘incognegro’ was Anatole. So were they black now? If they’re not, is it because it’s too late or because it’s too easy?…

…Still, these works do what America never will; participate in all the truth and reconciliation we’re ever going to have—piecemeal, caveated, hazy, statute of limitations-expired but more than blacks knew before. More than whites could bear to admit to before. Leave it to white narcissism to do for us what the urgings of conscience never will: put white perpetrators center stage. Now that it’s safe. Given that America won’t hold its breath until a black person goes digging for the ancestor who narc’d on Denmark Vesey, maybe blacks should cut whites some slack on their long overdue introspection. There’s no denying that blacks desperately want to know what the hell happened and how and only whites can tell us that…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets

Little, Brown and Company
2007
544 pages
5-1/2″ x 8-1/4″
ISBN: 9780316008068

Bliss Broyard

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard’s own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to “pass” in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity.

Read an excerpt here.

Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century

University Press of Florida
2012-09-02
152 pages
7×10
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4187-2

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.

Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.

It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins’s great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins’s story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.

Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism

University of Minnesota Press
October 2012
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-7918-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-7917-1

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Troubling the Family argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism—the seemingly massive and instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods in 1997—Habiba Ibrahim examines how the shifting status of racial hero for both black and multiracial communities makes sense only by means of an account of masculinity.

Ibrahim looks across historical events and memoirs (beginning with the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967 when miscegenation laws were struck down) to reveal that gender was the starting point of an analytics that made categorical multiracialism, and multiracial politics, possible. Producing a genealogy of multiracialism’s gendered basis allows Ibrahim to focus on a range of stakeholders whose interests often ran against the grain of what the multiracial movement of the 1990s often privileged—the sanctity of the heteronormative family, the labor of child rearing, and more precise forms of racial tabulation—all of which, when taken together, could form the basis for creating so-called neutral personhood.

Ibrahim concludes with a consideration of Barack Obama as a representation of the resurrection of the assurance that multiracialism extended into the 2000s: a version of personhood with no memory of its own gendered legacy, and with no self-account of how it became so masculine that it can at once fill the position of political leader and the promise of the end of politics.

Contents

• Introduction: The Rising Son of Multiracialism
• 1. Multiracial Timelines: A Genealogy of Personhood
• 2. Legitimizing the Deviant Family: Loving vs. Virginia and the Moynihan Report
• 3. The Whiteness of Maternal Memoirs: Politicizing the Multiracial Child
• 4. Ambivalent Outcomes: Blackness and the Return of Racial Passing
• Conclusion: Dreams of the Father and Potentials Lost
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013
pages 113-121
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp.(paper).

In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of “passing” for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. “He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.” Gates then added, “I feel sorry for him.”

This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the “bi-racial” and “mixed-race” movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories—and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph.

“Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women,” wrote Sharon Toomer, the author’s great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, “but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—€”not interpretation.” She continued: “In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white.” But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.

Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren’t entirely certain what to make of it.

Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinchback—€”the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—€”Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the publication of Cane, a questing soul in search of a racial identity outside of contemporary realities, hoping…

Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black)

by Danzy Senna

Chapter in: Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture
University of Michigan Press
2005
416 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-09840-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-06840-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02545-9

Edited By:

Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Kennell Jackson (1941-2005), Associate Professor of History
Stanford University

I have never had the comfort zone of a given racial identity. My mother is a Bostonian white woman of WASP heritage. My father is a Louisiana black man of mixed African and Mexican heritage. Unlike people who are automatically classified as black or white, I have always been up for debate. I am forever having to explain to people why it is that I look so white for a black girl, why it is that my features don’t reveal my heritage. It’s not something I should have to explain, but in America, at least, people are obsessed with this dissonance between my face and my race. White Americans in particular have a difficult time understanding why somebody of my background would choose blackness. With Tiger Woods proclaiming himself a Cablinasian, multiracial activists demanding new categories, and Newsweek declaring it hip to be mixed, it strikes most people as odd that I would call myself a black girl.

But my racial identity developed when I was growing up in Boston in the 1970s, where there were only two choices for me: black and white. For my sister, a year older than me, with curly hair and more African features, there weren’t even these choices. There was only black. And my parents, smitten with the black power politics of the time, taught my siblings and me, in no uncertain terms, that we were all black. They saw this identity as armor against the racism beyond our front door. They also knew that my sister didn’t have a choice, and to define us differently would be damaging to us as a family unit. The tact that the world saw each of us as different (my sister as light-skinned black, my brother as Puerto Rican, and me as Italian) raised complications, but didn’t change the fact that we were all one tribe…

Read the entire chapter here. (pages 83-87)

Love in black and white

Princeton Alumni Weekly
2009-04-22

Lawrence Otis Graham ’83

Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America

Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United States. He did it for love.

King moved back and forth between two sides of the color line: as the very public white, Newport-born, Yale-educated cartographer and researcher of the American West, and at other times as the strangely private man pretending to be a black Pullman train porter and itinerant steelworker (using the alias “James Todd”) who married an African-American woman. Martha Sandweiss, who joined Princeton’s history department this semester, explores King’s double life in her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Press in February. 

“While racial passing was surely attempted by some light-skinned blacks who wanted to escape the economic disadvantages tied to black life at the time,” explains Sandweiss, “it was virtually unheard-of for whites to voluntarily choose to face social and economic discrimination and live as black people.” But after falling in love with a black nursemaid, Ada Copeland, in 1888, that is what Clarence King did for 13 years. His wife and their five children had no idea that he was, in fact, white, and that he was the famous Clarence King, until he confessed it on his deathbed in 1901…

Read the entire article here.

Woman finds out famous relative was black

The Toronto Star
2011-02-23

Megan Ogilvie, Health Reporter

Growing up in Georgetown, Catherine Slaney knew her great-grandfather had an important and interesting past.

She knew he was a respected doctor and a surgeon in the American Civil War. She knew he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and had received a gift — the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration — from his widow after the president was killed. She knew he was a coroner in Kent County, Ont., and that he was involved in politics.

But Slaney did not know Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott was black…

…The uncle — Slaney’s mother’s brother — knew Abbott was black. His youngest sister, however, had no idea previous generations of her family had passed as white. Or that some family members still kept the secret.

“The family my mother and father knew was white-haired and pale-skinned,” Slaney says. “The question of race just never came up.”

Slaney says finding out Abbott was black cast a new importance on the pieces of history she did know about him. Abbott wasn’t just a doctor — he was the first black Canadian to be a licensed physician. He wasn’t just a coroner — he was the first the first black Canadian to hold the office…

..Slaney turned her research and personal experience into a book, Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line, which was published in 2000. She also completed a PhD at the University of Toronto, focusing on racial identity and the practice of passing.

By exploring her past, and finding her black heritage, Slaney says her outlook on the world has expanded…

Read the entire article here.