Mixed Race Studies

Into the box and out of the picture: The rhetorical management of the mulatto in the Jim Crow era

Duke University
2005
573 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3250085

Jené Lee Schoenfeld

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

Contemporary conventional wisdom maintains that anyone who has any trace of black ancestry is black. This precept, known as the “one drop rule,” was not always so widely accepted; in fact, from 1850 to 1920 an intermediate racial category—mulatto—appeared on the United States Census. Visibly “both/and” in a society of “either/or,” the ambiguous body of the mulatto had the potential to obscure the color line and thus the system of racial hierarchy predicated on the division it marks. Therefore, the limited tolerance under slavery of an intermediate racial status became untenable during Jim Crow. In my dissertation, I argue that the fiction of the Jim Crow era helped the one drop rule gain hegemonic status.

Through sustained close readings of texts by Frances Harper, Thomas Dixon, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, I argue that the biological determinism of the one drop rule is inadequate to explain what makes their characters—who are often physically, culturally, and even socially aligned with whiteness—”truly” black and suggest that in mulatto fiction, self-identification emerges as the fundamental basis of racial identity. I argue that fiction facilitated the containment of racial indeterminacy by “rhetorically managing” the mulatto into choosing blackness for herself through characterizations of those who remained racially liminal as tragically marginal and generally despicable, and contrasting characterizations of those who chose to identify as black as noble, privileged, and supported by the embrace of their families and their communities. The possibility of choosing one’s racial identification, however, undermines racial ideology’s essentialist pretense to racial authenticity. Therefore, choice must be supplemented by demonstrations of racial allegiance, such as “intraracial” marriage, which preserves at least the illusion of biological and cultural racial continuity, and seamless performances, of blackness or whiteness. Finally, I examine the relative authority—asymmetrical because of the construction of whiteness as pure and exclusive—of self-identification with respect to whiteness and blackness, and the near impossibility of self-identification outside this binary.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• 1. “What are you?” And why it matters
• 2. “Genocidal Images” or “Imagined Community”: Converting the Marginal Mulatto into a Light-Skinned Elite Black
• 3. Keeping Race in the Family: Marriage as Racial Pledge of Allegiance
• 4. Indeterminacy on the Loose! Invisible Blackness and the Permeability of the Color Line
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Biography

Introduction

The mulatto figure in American fiction is too often treated by critics as though she is static, both within individual texts and over the course of American literary history. Critics tend to assume that the most famous version of the mulatto figure—the antebellum tragic mulatto, whose near-whiteness was used to evoke white readers’ sympathy for the abolitionist cause is the only significant template for the mulatto figure. Moreover, they take for granted the mulatto’s essential blackness, explaining away her apparent whiteness as solely a concession to white racism. My dissertation models an approach to the mulatto figure that is attentive to the figure’s development.

On the scale of American literary history, I argue that the representation of the mulatto is inextricably bound up with the (United States’) political context. Though I am also interested in the way that racial indeterminacy is represented in contemporary texts, in what I think of as the post-mulatto moment, I decided quite early on that this was better saved for a future project. I focus instead on representations of the mulatto during the Jim Crow era and how those representations differ from antebellum representations of the mulatto. At its heart, this project is fundamentally a literary one, but as I sought to explain why the mulatto was represented differently in the Jim Crow era, I became interested in the relationship between those representations and a broader social and political context.

Accordingly, I offer an interdisciplinary hypothesis that literature concerning the mulatto—what I call “mulatto fiction”—was instrumental in facilitating an historical shift in the racial structure of the United States from an antebellum racial system with some possibility of a third racial category (labeled “mulatto”) to a system that is much more rigidly a binary of black and white. The effect of this historical shift was that the mulatto “became” black. While I believe that this may be true, I want to qualify this as a provisional claim. I can and do offer (mostly in chapter one) concrete evidence that such a historical shift occurred. For example, “mulatto” appeared as a category on the United States’ census from 1850 to 1920, but from 1930 onward, mulattoes were moved into the box marked “Negro,” and thus rendered invisible as mulattoes. It is to this shift that my title, “Into the Box and Out of the Picture,” refers. To establish the causal relationship between mulatto fiction and the historical shift that I describe, at this stage I can only offer a theory about why other, more obvious, forms of racial discipline, such as the law, might have had limited power to control the mulatto’s racial identification.

I would also qualify my related claim that mulatto fiction is invested in facilitating the development of the binary racial system through the disappearance of the mulatto. Additional research into authorial biography would allow me to make that claim more forcefully, however, I stand by that claim as a description of a trend in fiction of the early Jim Crow era (in the years shortly after Reconstruction). Some of the most interesting works of mulatto fiction—those by Faulkner and Larsen, for example—are critical of the binary racial schema. Those texts, however, tend to appear later in the Jim Crow era, when the binary is already well-established. Even in those texts, as I argue at length in the body of my dissertation, the critiques are limited by the existing terms of the discourse. In Quicksand, for example, Larsen locates the “problem” of the mulatto in the system—not in her mulatto protagonist, Helga—yet she cannot imagine any positive resolution to the situation. Though Helga eventually marries a black man and settles in the most apparently “authentic” black setting—among the folk of the rural South—almost as soon as she arrives, Helga is (as usual) looking for a way out. Despite Larsen’s critique of the racial system that so confines Helga, there is no way out for her. As in earlier works of mulatto fiction, Helga must fully embrace a black racial identity or die.

Another way in which my dissertation seeks to broaden the context in which we interpret the mulatto figure is by expanding the scope of the texts we might include. I argue for the consideration of what I call “mulatto discourse,” which, in addition to literary texts, includes representations of the mulatto in such fields as law and (pseudo)science. The mulatto, especially in the Jim Crow era, is a site of contestation over the establishment and location of the color line. That is to say, the mulatto figures centrally in arguments about where whiteness (along with “legitimate” access to white privilege) ends and blackness begins. Indeed, this is a question explored in the literature I discuss, but it is a battle fought in other contexts as well. Regarding the literature, I argue that authors on both sides of the color line, and from both racist and antiracist perspectives, are invested in the racial identification of the mulatto figure. The motivation behind such an investment differs; racists, obviously, are interested in supporting racial hierarchy, whereas antiracists may hope that a strategic cssentialism will create a richer base from which to mount challenges to that hierarchy. Similarly, racists and antiracists represent the mulatto differently with respect to the question of racial identity. Racists tend to emphasize the mulatto’s degeneracy, thereby suggesting that the mulatto should not exist. Antiracists tend to push the mulatto away from racial liminality by representing the tragically marginal mulatto negatively, while drawing the mulatto into blackness by representing the “light-skinned” member of the black elite positively. Despite these variations, these approaches are part of a common discourse. What all of the fictional texts under analysis in my dissertation have in common is an interest in the possibilities (in some cases, even the necessity) and the limits of self- identification for the mulatto.

Self-identification is particularly important in mulatto discourse because of the difficulty of using the external evidence of the mulatto’s phenotype to assign the mulatto a racial classification in accord with the rules established by racial ideology, in particular, the one drop rule, which dictates that anyone with a trace of black ancestry is to be considered as unequivocally black. My work focuses on the mulatto figure, exemplified by Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, whose phenotype suggests a white racial identity; the most “problematic” figure from the perspective of those invested in racial hierarchy. (I deliberately do not say “who could pass for white,” because then I, too, would be assuming the mulatto’s essential blackness, which I do not.) This mulatto’s apparent whiteness often contradicts her legal status as a black. (I say “often” because in some cases the mulatto is not legally black.) Racial ideology developed and deployed a set of narratives in various fields to support its insistence on the mulatto’s essential blackness despite the potentially contradictory “evidence” of phenotype, legal status, or even social acceptance in white communities. Though some texts in mulatto discourse frame their exploration of the contradiction embodied by the mulatto as a critique of the “logic” of racial ideology, the driving force of mulatto discourse during the Jim Crow era seems to be an impulse toward containment of racial ambiguity.

The ramifications for Jim Crow of the problem of the mulatto’s ambiguous body were both practical and ideological. The mulatto presented a practical problem for segregation because she could move out of the places designated for her without being detected. In other words, she could access white privilege without (according to racial ideology) being legitimately entitled to it. Furthermore, the mulatto—whose body is a concrete reminder of intimate relationships between blacks and whites—presented an ideological problem for segregation, a form of racial hierarchy that sought to institute maximum distance between the races.

Because the mulatto’s blackness does not register visually, I argue that agency assumes a greater role in the mulatto’s racial identification than it otherwise might. Racism is implicated in the stakes of how the mulatto identifies racially, but because she is not visually identifiable as black, she may not be personally subjected to racism unless she identifies as black and publicly expresses this identification. For example, in Iola Leroy, set shortly after the Civil War, Iola takes a job in a Northern white establishment as salesperson. She informs the manager that she is “colored,” and he hires her, but cautions her not to tell her fellow employees. Iola does promise this, but she does not go out of her way to broadcast her racial identification either. Then one day, a coworker is where I go.” Confused by her own reluctance to make the connection between Iola’s church attendance and her racial identification—thereby admitting that she has been working with a “colored” woman without knowing it—the other salesperson asks why Iola attends a colored church. Iola finally makes her meaning plain: “Because I wished to be with my own people” Comprehending at last, the (presumably “legitimately”) white salesperson “looked surprised and pained, and almost instinctively moved a little farther from her.” By the end of the day, the entire staff knows about Iola’s racial identification and they insist that Iola be fired, which she is. This is a very clear example of the way in which agency plays a unique role in the apparently white mulatto’s racial identification and attendant experience (or lack thereof) of racism. If she had been characterized by more obvious phenotypic cues suggesting blackness, Iola would probably never have been hired, not even by the manager inclined to give a colored girl a chance. Yet if Iola had simply lied about her church (and other personal details that may have come up), the salespeople and their customers would have continued to assume that she was “legitimately” white, and she would not have been fired…

 Purchase the dissertation here.

Miscegenation’s ‘dusky human consequences’

Postcolonial Studies
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2002
pages 297-307
DOI: 10.1080/1368879022000032801

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

In recent years there has been a surge in academic endeavours to claim hybridity as a site of transgression, subversion and liberation. In particular, hybridity has been deployed as a strategy for the negotiating of difference which, according to Homi Bhabha, is ‘neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between‘. Within this transformative ‘third space’, boundaries are remade and fixities destabilised. In the hands of less careful scholars, however, hybridity runs the risk of being idealised and dehistoricised as the only ‘enlightened’ response to oppression. Despite the evidence for reading the colonial process as one of mutual transculturation. affecting both coloniser and colonised cultures, the celebratory discourses of hybridity tend to foreground the destabilising of the latter. The danger of this notion of  ‘enlightened hybridity’ as Anne McClintock points out, is that it rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason. Other critics including Jean Fisher have argued that hybridity as a concept is too deeply embedded within a discourse of biology, and as such cannot extricate us from an original dualism of self and other.’ While this does not preclude the potential for the concept to be liberated from its origins and strategically transformed,  there is a need to be more attentive to the ways in which this transformation is mobilised.

Hybridity has its origins in nineteenth-century racial science; whether used to describe physiological 0r cultural difference, hybridity has served as the primary metaphor for the dangerous consequences of cross-racial contact. This essay focuses on the ambivalent figure of the Eurasian within the Australian national imaginary in order to elaborate on the thorny issue of hybridity as a source of both desire and anxiety. The term ‘race’ is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest in visible, phenotypical markers. The emphasis on somatic signifiers is important since the living product of cross-racial heterosexuality is primarily identified with and through the body. As my discussion goes on to demonstrate, the body of the racial hybrid is both the physical manifestation of cross-racial desire and the source of repulsion and fear. While race as a scientific category has long been disproven, it remains one of the most insidious aspects of our colonial heritage. The idea of race survives because the most consistent arguments about it have always been framed within cultural and aesthetic terms. Hence, in looking at the discourse of cross-racial desire. I am less interested in…

Read or purchase the article here.

Toward a Philosophy of Race in Education

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
May 2011
221 pages

Corey V. Kittrell

A Dissertation Presented for the Doctorate of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

There is a tendency in education theory to place the focus on the consequences of racial hegemony (racism, Eurocentric education, low performance by racial minorities) and ignore that race is antecedent to these consequences. This dissertation explores the treatment of race within critical theory in education. I conduct a metaphysical analysis to examine the race concept as it emerges from the works of various critical theorists in education. This examination shows how some scholars affirm the scientifically discredited race concept by offering racial essentialist approaches for emancipatory education. I argue that one of consequences of these approaches is the further tightening of racial constraints on the student’s personal autonomy. This mandates that critical theorists gain a deeper understanding of race as a problem, conceptually, epistemically, ideologically, and existentially. I argue that critical theorists of education draw from work conducted in the philosophy of race by theorists such as K. Anthony Appiah, Jorge Gracia, Charles Mills, and Naomi Zack to gain insights on the metaphysics of race to better inform theory and praxis. I further recommend the creation of a critical philosophy of race in education to address and combat race as a problem and its consequences. I contend that the groundwork for philosophy of race in education must entail strategies that encourage and assist theorists and teachers to move toward the elimination of the race in society, while utilizing race only as heuristic tool to address its consequences. Additionally, I argue that a philosophy of race in education must advocate for an education for autonomy as a means to racial liberation for students.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I
  • Introduction
    • Theoretical Perspective
    • Objects of Investigation
    • Descriptive Analysis of Critical Theory in Education
    • Normative Analysis
    • The Philosophy of Race
    • Toward A Philosophy of Race in Education
• CHAPTER II
  • The Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
    • The Process of Reification
    • The Problem of Reification
    • The Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
      • Critical Race Theory: Race and Culturally Relevant Teaching
      • Afrocentricity In Education: Constructing Diasporas
      • Critical Multiculturalism: Race and Affirmation
      • Politicizing The Racial Binary
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER III
  • Historical Underpinnings of the Problem of Reification in Critical Theory in Education
    • The Hampton Approach
    • Liberal Education
    • New Black Intelligentsia
      • W.E.B. DuBois
      • Carter G. Woodson
    • Black Power and Black Studies
    • The History of Black Education and Critical Theory: A Synthesis
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER IV
  • Critical Theory in Education and the Problem of Race
    • Race as an Axiomatic System.
    • Autonomy and the Black Individual
    • Autonomy and the Black Social Self
    • Engaging the Problem of Race in Critical Theory in Education
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER V
  • The Philosophy of Race
    • Theoretical Positions within the Philosophy of Race
    • The Problem of Race
      • Charles S. Mills
      • Kwame Anthony Appiah
      • Naomi Zack
    • Race and Identity
      • Mills on Racial Identity
      • Zack on Mixed Race Identity
      • Appiah on Racial Identity
      • Jorge Gracia on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity
    • Racialism, Racism, and White Supremacy.
    • Philosophy of Race and Education
    • Conclusion
• CHAPTER VI
  • Toward a Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Introduction: A Critical Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Eliminativist and Anti-Eliminativist Arguments
      • Arguments for Racial Eliminativism
      • Anti-Eliminativist Arguments
    • Education for Autonomy as Liberatory
      • A Liberatory Role for Reason in a Philosophy of Race in Education
      • A Liberatory Role for Knowledge in a Philosophy of Race in Education
    • Toward a Philosophy of Race of Education
    • Conclusion: Toward A Philosophy of Race For Education
• CHAPTER VII
  • Conclusion
• LIST OF REFERENCES
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race

Social Theory and Practice
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2000)
pages 103-128

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

For people concerned by philosophy’s reputation for ivory-tower isolation, K. Anthony Appiah’s work on race is one of the more encouraging developments to come along in some time. Appiah has contributed greatly to making one of the messier and more contentious public issues of our time into an acceptable subject of English-language philosophical inquiry. And having launched his project by taking W.E.B. Du Bois as one of his principal interlocutors, he has also helped rescue an important American social theorist from the shadows of philosophical neglect.

As it happens, Appiah ushers Du Bois into the light mainly to make visible what appear to him to be blemishes. We can see this, and we can see why, from the title of one of the essays that mark Appiah’s inception of the project: “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.”(1) Du Bois was a racialist: he believed that races are real entities, that racial identities are real and valuable properties of human individuals, and that racial solidarity can help realize such human goods as equality and self-actualization. He accepted, of course, the testimony of the physical sciences, building even in his day toward the conclusion that races are not useful posits for the physical sciences; but he nevertheless insisted that race exists, as a phenomenon that is “clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.”(2) Appiah, by contrast, is what we might call a racial eliminativist. He believes that races do not exist, that acting as if they do is metaphysically indefensible and morally dangerous, and, as a result, that eliminating “race” from our metaphysical vocabularies is an important step toward the right, or a better–that is to say, a rational and just–world-view.

A number of commentators have taken issue with Appiah’s treatment of Du Bois’s, or of Du Boisian, sociohistorical racialism.(3) Unfortunately, neither Appiah nor his critics seem to have noticed a fairly straightforward way of reading Du Bois’s argument, a way that leads to a similarly straightforward refutation of the metaphysical underpinnings for Appiah’s eliminativism–a way that it is one of the burdens of this essay to make clear. I’m interested in the metaphysics of Appiah’s eliminativism because he says often enough that we should stop talking about race on pain of various sorts of moral error, but he argues mainly that we should stop talking about race because there’s no such thing. He makes his way to his eliminativist conclusion as Peirce suggests: by weaving different strands of argument into, as it were, “a cable whose fibres … are … numerous and intimately connected,” rather than by producing a single chain of reasoning “which is no stronger than its weakest link.”(4) But the metaphysical “strand” does most of the work, does it badly, and gets away with it because of its entanglement with broadly plausible ethical claims that are too poorly developed to stand on their own.

In this essay I will construct the alternative readings of Du Bois and Appiah that I have in mind. I am concerned to do so not, or not principally, because of some abstract interest in clearing the ontological ground. My concern derives from the concrete worry that Appiah’s metaphysical sleight-of-hand obscures the need for a real debate about the merits of racialized and race-based practices and institutions. My sense is that once we quit kicking up the dust with arguments about the alleged non-existence of race, we’ll be able to see how much work remains to be done on the ethics of racial identification. That is: Once we recognize that there are eminently sensible routes to the claim that races do exist, perhaps we’ll recognize also that worries about the prudence and permissibility of appealing to race ought to be explicated and addressed in those terms. It is not enough simply to gesture at moral concerns while using metaphysics to avoid moral argument.

I will begin in sections 2 and 3 by examining the argument that Appiah develops in the second chapter of his important book, In My Father’s House.(5) His claim there is that Du Bois’s allegedly sociohistorical racialism ultimately relies on a more or less garden-variety biological notion of race. My counterclaim on Du Bois’s behalf is that Appiah manages this reading only by seizing upon perhaps the least plausible ways of rendering a few rather crucial details and by manufacturing perplexity in the face of a patently non-vicious circularity.

In section 4, I take a moment to sketch the kind of account that I take Du Bois to have been groping for. Then in sections 5 and 6, I consider the argument that Appiah develops in his contribution to the prize-winning book, Color-Conscious.(6) In “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” he uses conceptual analysis to argue that race-talk necessarily involves an untoward commitment to biological racialism. Unfortunately for the eliminativist cause, this argument pre-supposes the success of the earlier attempt to unmask Du Bois as a biological racialist, and eventually gets mired in metaphysical vacillation. Appiah does go on to gesture at the ethical concerns that motivate his inquiry, but, as we’ll see, without their metaphysical accompaniment these gestures don’t get him very far…

Read the entire article here.

The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race

Critical Inquiry
Volume 12, Number 1, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Autumn, 1985)
pages 21-37

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
Princeton University

Introduction

Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of “racial” difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can say that “the proportion of genic variation attributable to racial differences is … 9-11%.”‘ If they want to make it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3 percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. (I will discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories—in the population of England that are not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too (though more) which are found in Zaire but not in similar proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of the consensus (see “GR,” pp. 1-59). A more familiar part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political ideology—those differences which most deeply affect us in our dealings with each other—are not biologically determined to any significant degree.

These claims will, no doubt, seem outrageous to those who confuse the question of whether biological difference accounts for our differences with the question of whether biological similarity accounts for our similarities. Some of our similarities as human beings in these broadly cultural respects—the capacity to acquire human languages, for example, or, more specifically, the ability to smile—are to a significant degree biologically determined. We can study the biological basis of these cultural capacities and give biological explanations of our exercise of them. But if biological difference between human beings is unimportant in these explanations – and it is-then racial difference, as a species of biological difference, will not matter either.

In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du Bois—who called his life story the “autobiography of a race concept”—came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined at present, however, not to express our understanding of the intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race than any other social theorist of our century…

Read the entire article here.

‘Black Is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis’

Culture, Theory and Critique
Volume 47, Issue 2 (2006)
Pages 149-163
DOI: 10.1080/14735780600961619

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

Race is rigorously policed through, and predicated on, a crisis of maintaining a claim to supposed racial ontology. The language of crisis pervades race; yet crisis is only brought into focus—shows itself—when racial ontology is called into question or threatened as an axiomatic reality. This essay argues, however, that it is crisis, in the form of the imperative regulatory call to race or the intricate operations of racialising discipline that constitutes raced subjects. The crisis is one of belonging or of successfully representing a ‘racial truth’. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that it is when race is viewed as performative that crisis becomes evident as the ever-present condition of racial identity formation. From this vantage point, the concept of crisis as a point of danger can be revised to be seen as a turning point when an important change can take place: then, crisis might be envisaged as a positive means through which to imagine and realise new enactments of racial being.

Read or purchase the article here.

Retroactive phantasies: discourse, discipline, and the production of race

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 14, Issue 3 (2008)
Pages 333-347
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802088219

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

The present inquiry considers how the practice and notion of race can be figured as a type of discipline that functions to achieve the subjection of the individual—to form the individual as a racial subject. Focusing on the constructions of blackness and whiteness within US racial rhetoric, and engaging the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I propose that racial identity is a retroactive phantasy that is always conditional on the subject enacting the very power that marks them: the formation and maintenance of subjectivity is premised on the individual being formed and forming themselves in relation to a normalized identity site and is, thus, always an action. Precisely due to this necessity to act, and to the incoherence of power, innovative acts of anti-discipline re-negotiate the ways in which racial subjectivity is lived and realized.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection

Indiana University Press
2011-12-23
236 pages
Paper 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4

Nadine Ehlers, Professor
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler’s account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 “racial fraud” case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault’s later work on ethics and “technologies of the self” to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Racial Disciplinarity
• 2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
• 3. Passing through Racial Performatives
• 4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
• 5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
• 6. Imagining Racial Agency
• 7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
• Bibliography
• Index

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

Fordham University Press
May 2011
256 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780823234509; Hardback ISBN: 9780823234493

Michael J. Monahan, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Marquette University

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism?

Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a “politics of purity”—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.

Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.

Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a “creolizing subjectivity” that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.

Table of Contents

• Acknowldegements
• Introduction
• Contingency, History, and Ontology: On Abolishing Whiteness
• Turbulent and Dangerous Spirits: Irish Servitude in Barbados
• Race and Biology: Scientific Reason and the Politics of Purity
• “Becoming” White: Race, Reality, and Agency
• The Politics of Purity: Colonialism, Reason, and Modernity
• Creolizing Subjects: Antiracism and the Future of Philosophy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Responsible Mixed Race Politics

How do identities matter?
Stanford University
2005-01-13

Presentation by:

Ronald Sundstrom, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of San Francisco

The harshest critics of mixed-race have claimed that the identity is self-indulgent and irresponsible, because it evades or, worse, is complicit in racism. Such strident condemnations of mixed-race identity are dogmatic and uncharitable. In “Being & Being Mixed Race,” I argued that mixed-race is a real social identity and that it need not be morally illegitimate. In this essay I return to the topic of the relationship between mixed-race identity and politics and the dynamics of racism. There are disturbing trends in mixed-race literature and organizations that precisely are irresponsible in the way critics of the mixed-race movement have asserted. I criticize these developments, and counter that mixed-race individuals and groups have a special obligation to resist racism and to refuse the “wages of whiteness” that accrue from their mixed-race status. Although all persons have a moral obligation to reject and resist racism, mixed-race individuals and groups have special obligations that are based on their own experience of race and racism, and their place in the history and experience of race and racism in America. Just as mixed-race persons argue that they are morally obligated to remember and affirm their complex family histories-to not forget their mothers-they have an equal obligation to remember the significance of their personal history in the history of race in America: we have an equal obligation to the memories of our grandmothers.