Mixed Race Studies

Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

University of Tennessee Press
2013-01-11
150 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 1572339322; ISBN-13: 978-1572339323

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University

The past two decades have seen a growing influx of biracial discourse in fiction, memoir, and theory, and since the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency, debates over whether America has entered a “post-racial” phase have set the media abuzz. In this penetrating and provocative study, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both “blackness” and “whiteness” by invoking multiple racial identities.

Focusing on several key novels—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as well as memoirs by Obama, James McBride, and Rebecca Walker and the personae of singer Mariah Carey and actress Halle Berry, Dagbovie-Mullins challenges conventional claims about biracial identification with a concept she calls “black-sentient mixed-race identity.” Whereas some multiracial organizations can diminish blackness by, for example, championing the inclusion of multiple-race options on census forms and similar documents, a black-sentient consciousness stresses a perception rooted in blackness—“a connection to a black consciousness,” writes the author, “that does not overdetermine but still plays a large role in one’s racial identification.” By examining the nuances of this concept through close readings of fiction, memoir, and the public images of mixed-race celebrities, Dagbovie-Mullins demonstrates how a “black-sentient mixed-race identity reconciles the widening separation between black/white mixed race and blackness that has been encouraged by contemporary mixed-race politics and popular culture.”

A book that promises to spark new debate and thoughtful reconsiderations of an especially timely topic, Crossing B(l)ack recognizes and investigates assertions of a black-centered mixed-race identity that does not divorce a premodern racial identity from a postmodern racial fluidity.

Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense

Harvard University Press
February 2013
384 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
2 graphs, 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674064461

Edited by

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning in the School of Arts; Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Public Health & Community Medicine in the School of Medicine
Tufts University

Jeremy Gruber, President and Executive Director
Council for Responsible Genetics

Can genes determine which fifty-year-old will succumb to Alzheimer’s, which citizen will turn out on voting day, and which child will be marked for a life of crime? Yes, according to the Internet, a few scientific studies, and some in the biotechnology industry who should know better. Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber gather a team of genetic experts to argue that treating genes as the holy grail of our physical being is a patently unscientific endeavor. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about how DNA actually contributes to human development.

The concept of the gene has been steadily revised since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed set of master molecules, genes and DNA are seen as a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. Rather than an autonomous predictor of disease, the DNA we inherit interacts continuously with the environment and functions differently as we age. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Emphasizing relatively new understandings of genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance, the authors put into a broad developmental context the role genes are known to play in disease, behavior, evolution, and cognition.

Rather than dismissing genetic reductionism out of hand, Krimsky and Gruber ask why it persists despite opposing scientific evidence, how it influences attitudes about human behavior, and how it figures in the politics of research funding.

What does Martin Luther King mean to Latinos today?

Bentley IMPACT – The Power of Ideas
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts
2013-01-17

Donna Maria Blancero, Associate Professor of Management

“I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2013, we must ask ourselves the question: has his dream become a reality for Latinos?

We know that Dr. King inspired many Latinos, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Latinos, just like other Americans, consider Dr. King a great leader of the civil rights movement. If he were alive today, he likely would be working side by side with Latinos to address issues of inequality.

But what does his legacy mean for us today? Has his dream been achieved?…

…When I ask participants in my research to self-identify their race (they all self-identify as Latino), I am typically met with a range of responses. Some are angry at me and state that they are Mexican American or Puerto Rican and that I shouldn’t be asking about race—their race, they say, is Latino! Others have written in comments, such as “I checked off ‘white’ but don’t tell my family, they would be angry at me.” Many Latinos have mixed backgrounds that don’t easily fit into a box. More importantly, many of us don’t want to be put in a box, even if it is “multi-racial.’”…

Read the entire article here.

The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

University of Maryland, College Park
2004
391 pages

Traci B. Abbott, Lecturer, English and Media Studies
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, nonwhite women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters.  Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery.

Read the entire dissertation here.

“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

AsianShakespearean ~ Poetic Justifications, Artistic Testimonies…
2012-04-25

Rebecca Hu

Scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing has frequently been approached from the angles of race and queer theories.  H. J. Landry and soon after, Brian Carr, have recently broken ground in their demonstrations of a new synthesized approach to the discourses, taking into account symptomatic readings of homosexual desire as an expression of hooksian feminism and ethnic pride. Nevertheless, by synthesizing, both critical approaches tread dangerously on the delicate lines concerning race and gender: Landry, although meticulously addressing his usage of the term, “mulatto,” in his third footnote, takes the political construction of “race” for granted; his perpetual separation of “black” and “white” as distinct figures even as he rebukes this constructed “blood quantum version of race” undermines the internal, complex “cultural authenticities” which Candice Jenkins just a year before him had striven to demarcate in her analysis of the same novel (46-47). So undermining, Landry problematically critiques that performance of conventional femininity through submission to black men is “embracing inferiority” (25). Carr, in a similar vein, situates paranoid interpretations of passing as “nothing” for “something,” implying consequently that “blackness” and “whiteness” are, in fact, differentiated by absence and existence respectively. Carr’s ironic dichotomy necessitates qualification throughout his assessment of paranoia. He admits repeatedly that concentrated focus on the nothing does, indeed, further paranoia itself. Controversy arises in Carr’s article when he subsequently links paranoia with homosexuality with the “killing desire” which ultimately eliminates Clare Kendry (291) — this time, without sufficient qualification. These racial and gender pitfalls caution us to re-evaluate our current synthesis when speaking of Passing…

Read the entire article here.

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

HarperCollins
2005
240 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780060761424; ISBN10: 0060761423

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation’s leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from “mongrelization”). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family’s South Carolina plantation.

Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew—one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate—and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before—told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-02-04

Elaine Woo

In 2003 the retired L.A. schoolteacher unburdened herself of a secret: Her father was Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a career as a champion of segregation.

A week before Christmas in 2003, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher stood before a phalanx of news cameras and 250 reporters in a South Carolina ballroom and declared, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
 
After more than 60 years, Washington-Williams had chosen to unburden herself of a secret: that she, a black woman, had been fathered by a white man — Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a long Washington career as a champion of segregation.
 
Thurmond had died five months earlier at age 100, having never acknowledged that his liaison with a family maid when he was 22 had produced a daughter. At 78, Washington-Williams decided she owed it to history to speak up.

“My children ultimately convinced me that history needed to know about Thurmond and that I should set the record straight,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I am not doing this for money. I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
 
Washington-Williams, 87, died Monday of natural causes in Columbia, S.C., said her attorney, Frank K. Wheaton. After more than 40 years in Los Angeles, she moved back to South Carolina a few years ago when her health began to deteriorate…

Read the entire obituary here.

Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association)
Volume 119, Number 2 (March, 2004)
pages 282-295

Brian Carr

Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) has occasioned a great deal of paranoid interpretation, in large part because the novel is about nothing. I use nothing in the sense of no thing or a non-object, both of which are irreducible to the familiar meaning of nothing as inconsequential or strictly nonexistent.’ In the framework of paranoid interpretation, desire and knowledge imaginarily coincide with an object much that everything, imagined to include nothing, becomes something. Paranoid interpretation is less a property of Passingthan a transactional dynamic between the novel and the critical work on it, a dynamic activated in large part by many critics’ “hateloving” attachment to Passing’scentral character, Irene Redfield. Reading Irene’s interpretations of her life as paranoid delusions, many critics have an inverted and corrective investment in her. As if to resolve yet sustain Irene’s wild interpretations, the contemporary scholarly archive on Passing is virtually unified in its belief that her paranoid apprehensions can be submitted to a proper reading that will furnish the positive knowledge Irene systematically misses.

Critics are not strictly wrong in their characterization of Irene as, in Deborah E. McDowell’s words, “clearly deluded” (xxvi). And yet, the fact that many critics work to procure for themselves the clarity they need to assign paranoid delusion to Irene leads one to wonder, how “deluded” are the critics? If paranoia, through delusion, converts nothing into something, the bulk of the critical work on Passing is in reach of paranoia, since the work, too, impulsively confounds something with nothing, truth with what at best can be only half told, desire with what Kaja Silvermanaptly calls its “impossible nonobject”(39). Critics often find that Irene’s delusional mentality and Larsen’s manifest text of racial passing and heterosexual jealousy collaborate to occlude a latent homosexuality, which neither Larson nor…

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

University of Minnesota Press
2008
328 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5105-4; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5105-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5104-7; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5104-3

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

Questions the ramifications of multiracialism for progressive social change.

Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiracialism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.

In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.

An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: On the Verge of Race
• 1. Beyond the Event Horizon: The Multiracial Project
• 2. Scales of Coercion and Consent: Sexual Violence, Antimiscegenation, and the Limits of Multiracial America
• 3. There Is No (Interracial) Sexual Relationship
• 4. The Consequence of Race Mixture
• 5. The True Names of Race: Blackness and Antiblackness in Global Contexts
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Racial Medicine: Not So Fast

The Daily Beast
2008-08-19

Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
Reuters

Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that “race is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.” Then duck before you get punched in the face. . . . but as you’re avoiding injury try to hand your would-be assailants a new paper published online this afternoon by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, which concludes that classifying people by the crude category of race—as in, of African, Asian or European ancestry—for medical purposes, as some people want to do, is really, really stupid…

…Which brings us to the new study. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute got the cool idea of analyzing the genomes of two white guys who, according to the conventional racial categories, belong to the same race. The two are Venter himself and James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Venter led the private effort to sequence the human genome, winding up in a tie with the public project to do the same.

It happens that the genomes of both men are in the public domain. Watson agreed to have his sequenced and published last year, with Venter right behind. So what do the genomes reveal?

The two men metabolize drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, antipsychotics and the cancer drug tamoxifen, differently. Venter has two functional copies of the CYP2D6 form of the cytochrome P-450 gene, which metabolizes more than 75 percent of drugs, while Watson has two copies of the more-sluggish variant of the gene. That’s rare for Caucasians (only 3 percent of whites have the sluggish version), but common in East Asians (49 percent of whom have it). Funny, Watson doesn’t look Chinese. But if Watson’s doctor decided to use race-based medicine to predict how he would metabolize drugs, she’d say, well, we have a white guy here, and whites rarely have the sluggish version, so I’ll assume Watson doesn’t have it either. As a result, the drug would stay in Watson’s system longer, with stronger effects compared to someone in whom the drug was quickly metabolized and cleared from the body. “It is unlikely that a doctor would guess that optimal drug dosages might differ for Drs. Watson and Venter,” the scientists write.

That’s why Venter and colleagues conclude that race is too crude a proxy for what genetic group—ethnicity or, as biologists say, population—someone belongs to. It is imperative to “go beyond simplistic ethnic categorization,” they write, since that can be seriously—and perhaps fatally—misleading. (In the U.S., some 100,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions, many caused by an inability to properly metabolize the medication because of a particular CYP2D6 variation.) “Race/ethnicity should be considered only a makeshift solution for personalized genomics because it is too approximate,” they write…

Read the entire article here.