Mixed Race Studies

Alden J. Blethen vs. Jack Johnson

The Seattle Republican
Seattle, Washington
Volume XV, Number 43
1909-03-19
page 1, column 3
Source: United States Library of Congress: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

How perfectly natural for some folk to strain at a gnat and yet gulp down a camel; to see a pigeon on a barn, but not observe the barn; to struggle to remove a mote from the other fellow’s eye and overlook the beam in his own. Thus it is with the editor of the Seattle Daily Times, who for the past ten days or more has been in a veritable state of hysteria over “Jack Johnson and his white wife,” and has felt called upon to station himself upon the watch wall of “white supremacy” to give the danger alarm of black men capturing white women. The colonel has been seeing things for a number of years and his state of mind is evidently not improving.

If it be true, as the editor of the Times alleges, “that the people of this part of the world are distinctly opposed to miscegenation,” then we are at a loss to account for the four million half caste white and black folk “in this part of the world.” By “the people” we judge the editor of the Times means the white men “in this part of the world,” and yet we would hate to think the editor of the Times is despicable enough to charge even by inuendo that the white women are responsible for the four million mulatoes, yet they must be if the white men are as bitterly opposed to the miscegenation of black and white folks as the editor of the Times declares they are, or the white men “of this part of the world” encourage the misegenation of white men black amoritas, but do not favor equal privileges to the white women for black Othellos.

The editor of the Times goes on record as having no sympathy for a black man marrying or cohabiting with a white woman, but is as silent as the moonbeams about the white man and the black woman. But all of this claptrap about “Johnson and his white wife” is a gallery play to popularize the paper by inciting race strife. Tillman made himself not only United States senator, but a millionaire as well by playing on the same vulgar violin of race prejudice and did so when there was no more actual danger of “nigger dominancy” in the South than there was of Indian dominancy in the West. We are not advocates of black and white miscegenation but despite our protest the white man plunges headlong into the black sea of miscegenation and is thereby slowly but surely absorbing the black man, and in a half century more the black man, like lo the poor Indian, will be the white man.

Will the Negro Emigrate?

Omaha Daily Bee
1894-07-01
page 13, columns 1-2
(Source: Library of Congress)

Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, President of Oxford College [University]
Oxford, Georgia

Bishop Atticus G. Haygood Argues that They will Not.

Another view of the Race Problem

Inter-Marriage of Whites and Negroes Less Common than Formerly—The Plan of Despotism a Failure—Progress of the Colored Race.

There is a negro question and not simply a matter of adjustment of relations between two classes of the same race, as of landlords and tenants, employers and employes—all be ing white or black, but of men and women of two very different races holding business and ther relations to each other and living together In the same communities. Whether the race element makes difficulty between white and black in other countries does not count, so far as facts go, here. In the United States it does make difficulty and in the south chiefly only because most of the negroes are in the southern states.

A few negroes have gone north as a few northern people have come south. How do these get on together? It is a question of facts only. Northern people and negroes, when brought Into relations, get on together just as southern people and their negro neighbors do, with unquestionably this difference, southern white people are more patient with negroes they employ than northern people are and, in personal relations, are more kind to them.

It is essentially, at bottom, a race question in all parts of the United States—of which I have had personal observation from Ohio to Texas and from Massachusetts to California. It was a question before and since the war; a question whenever and wherever these two peoples have been thrown together. It is a race question now and will be so long as the two races live together In this country.

Doctrinaries of many schools—striving strenuously to force facts into conformitywith their theories—have told us how to solve the race question that every day and hour demands our consideration. And a very emergent and important question it is.

There have not been lacking theorizers who have trusted in what they first called “amalgamation,” afterwards “miscegenation.” A few have seemed to gain a sort of pleasure in contemplating such a solution. It is a very monstrous and brutal way of looking at it. But it is as silly as it is revolting. One, a bishop, spoke of It as a “bleaching” process!

THE TENDENCY TO MISCEGENATION GROWING LESS.

Every informed person In the south knows that the tendency to miscegenation grows less and less every year. Emancipation strengthened in both races revolt at blood-mingling by these dissimilar people. The negro question will never be solved by any process of race effacement—though we wait a thousand years. The mulatto will gradually disappear. This negro question, inherited from our fathers, we will hand down to our children.

In seeking the best solution to any difficult question It is often very helpful to find out what cannot be done. Let us eliminate from our thinking the element of miscegenation.

THE NEGRO HERE TO STAY.

We may as well eliminate solution by deportation. In what follows on this point I must run the risk of being charged with dogmatism. One who has received impressions concerning any matter from his infancy may well enough have controlling reasons for conclusions he cannot give to another lacking similar knowledge.

One of my conclusions is: The negro is here to stay—concerning which opinion one might write a book, without getting to the end.

Bishop Henry M. Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal church I have known since he first appeared in reconstruction politics–the like of which the sun never saw before and never can see again—in Georgia a generation ago. He is a man of great ability and of intense convictions. His whole soul is set on emigration to Africa as the one possible solution of the negro question. If he had a thousand years to live he would give nine centuries of his “expectation of life” to see his hope a reality. No man knows better than Bishop Turner that the negro question in the United States is a race question. I believe he thinks it a permanent question. I do most certainly. He has made many most eloquent speeches, seeking to fire the hearts of his people with an invincible desire to find homes, opportunity, freedom and enlargement of life in Africa. He has despaired of their finding these great boons here. If he could found, or see founded, a great christian negro republic in Africa he would be the happiest man in the world. He is, I am sure, most conscientious in all he thinks and says on the subject.

But he awakens among his own people more antagonism than favor when he urges them to colonize the dark continent.

EMIGRATION TO AFRICA.

The newspapers gave much prominence to such movements as Garton’s; a ship load of southern negroes going to Siberia from this country some months since. As if twice so many negroes wore not born the day they sailed!

As affecting the negro question such ill-managed enthusiastic escapades amount to nothing. The few who go are, in the opinion of the multitudes who stay, only freaks. Whether colonization be advocated by white or black men, doctrinaries or philanthropists, it is the same thing; the sum of the result is anger and distrust.

The fundamental reason for rejecting colonization in Africa ns a solution of our problem is a very simple and conclusive one; the negroes do not wish to go and they do not intend to go. Moreover, the great body of the white people do not wish them to go away. History shows that great epoch-making migrations result from some deep impulse urging the race that moves and not the desire of some other race that does not move. A people, dominated by another race, might bo so oppressed as to create this race-moving impulse. How little southern negroes are so affected we see in the very small number that have moved out of the old slave states into northern and western portions of the union. It may be answered–they find that their condition is not helped by such movings in the United States. Let another make the retort; I will not anticipate it by so much as offering an opinion about it.

NO MOVEMENT BY FORCE.

As to moving the negroes to Africa by force, I never heard of a southern man who entertained such a thought for a moment. Were it attempted from without and the negroes were passive (and they would not be passive) southern men would make trouble of an extraordinary sort if there were a fit country in which to settle them; if there were means for moving them; no right-thinking man would consent to send these people away against their will. Violent deportation would surpass the wrong that brought them here.

The exceptions to these statements are so few that they do not count in any view of the whole subject under consideration. The southern white people who want them out of this country are as few as the negroes who have gone to Africa or wish to go.

THE NEGROES WILL BE PROTECTED

A few weeks since the newspapers told us of some “striking brotherhood” that passed resolutions that “the negro must go.” They were not men of the south, the men of the south will protect the negro against men like these if they go beyond resolutions—to deeds.

What God’s providence may bring about as to the relation of these truly wonderful people to Africa, men Will know what time it pleases God to show his designs to men. That the negro race In America has important and vital relations to the future of Africa is as plain to me as that they came from Africa. But this is equally clear, if all the negroes wished to go, if all the white people wished them to go, if the United States government owned vast territories in Africa, if the people of the United States were ready to “foot the bill” for moving and settling and protecting them, the negroes here are now no more ready for to stupendous a change than Africa is ready for them. Great changes are going on in Africa. Greater by education and Christianization among the negroes here.

BUSINESS INTEREST OF THE NEGRO.

Before closing this article another view of the case should be presented. The southern negro has business and other interests in this country which he begins to appreciate very highly. He is getting land of his own; he Is accumulating property; he is educating his children. He is getting to be a business man. At this point I quote a paragraph from a speech delivered In the United States senate May 28, by the Junior senator from Georgia, the Hon. Patrick Walsh—an Irishman profoundly patriotic to America; a Catholic so broad minded and liberal that he is an example of tolerance and charity to many Protestants—than whom an honester, truer man is not in the United States senate. I have many times gone over the ground and the senator’s statements are from first sources—the books of the comptroller general of Georgia. Georgia has separate lists for the return of taxable property by whites and blacks. It is important that we study the business facts that enter into the general question. It is to be wished that other southern states would adopt the same method.

THE VIEW OF SENATOR WALSH.

Senator Walsh, a better authority than Miss Ida Wells, says:

“A fact worthy of note Is that the negroes returned for taxation In Georgia, property aggregating in value In 1879, $5,182,398; in 1889, $10,115,380; in 1893. $14,960,675. (He might, have added that the imitative negro never “gives in” his property at any fancy valuation; $15,000,000 In 1893 means about $40,000,000.)”

“This is an Indisputable evidence that tho negro is given a fair showing, and that in Georgia the industrious and econominal citizen can make a living and accumulate property, whether he be white or black. The negro is treated fairly, and besides being able to acquire property, his children are given educational advantages which they eagerly Improve. Georgia appropriates in round numbers eleven hundred thousand dollars for public schools, and this goes equally to the critical ion of both races. The tentedly together and the negroes recognize that their best friends are the whites among whom they live, who know their habits and customs, and have a more genuine interest in them than those who profess a great deal more.”

This witness is true. I spell “Negro” with a “big N.” In this question Negro means a race and not a color.

Atticus G. Haygood
Oxford, Ga.

Soledad O’Brien: A woman of many backgrounds

Irish Voice
2009-07-22

Cahir O’Doherty, Arts Editor and Feature Writer

Maria de la Soledad Teresa O’Brien’s name is like a bridge across cultures. In Spanish her full name means “The Blessed Virgin Mary of Solitude,” and when she first started working in the media many people quietly suggested she change it.

She refused. Pride in her cross-cultural heritage demanded that she be true to herself. Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island, she had always been Soledad O’Brien, she saw no reason to alter the fact.

“As much as my name is unusual, it aptly describes everything I am,” O’Brien, 42, told the Irish Voice. “I’m a light skinned black girl with fuzzy hair who’s got freckles.

“I think my full name kind of references that all in. I just didn’t want to lose that, and so I really held onto the name.”…

Read the entire article here.

How Personalized Medicine Became Genetic, and Racial: Werner Kalow and the Formations of Pharmacogenetics

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 68, Number 1, January 2013
pages 1-48
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrr046

David S. Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine
Harvard University

Physicians have long puzzled over a well-known phenomenon: different patients respond differently to the same treatment. Although many explanations exist, pharmacogenetics has now captured the medical imagination. While this might seem part of the broader interest in all things genetic, the early history of pharmacogenetics reveals the specific factors that contributed to the emergence of genetics within pharmacology. This paper examines the work of one pioneering pharmacologist, Werner Kalow, to trace the evolving intellectual formations of pharmacogenetics and, in particular, the focus on race. Working in the 1950s and 1960s, Kalow made three arguments to demonstrate the relevance of genetics to pharmacology, based on laboratory techniques, analogies to differences between other animal species, and appeals to the logic of natural selection. After contributing to the emergence of the field, Kalow maintained his advocacy for pharmacogenetics for four decades, collecting more evidence for its relevance, navigating controversies about race and science, and balancing genetics against other possible explanations of patient variability. Kalow’s work demonstrates the deep roots of the genetic and racial preoccupations in pharmacology. Understanding this history can restore attention to other explanations of individuality in medical practice, something of increasing importance given the current interest in personalized medicine.

Read the entire article here.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (Davis review)

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 22, Number 1, January 2013
pages 163-165
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2013.0012

Rebecca L. Davis, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

Campaigns to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples have inspired activists, journalists, scholars, and others to look to the history of interracial marriage for comparisons. Fay Botham’s new book appears as one consequence of these interests. Frustrated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to countenance marriage for same-sex partners in the early twenty-first century, Botham details the Roman Catholic Church’s relatively progressive attitude toward interracial marriage in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. She notes as well the pernicious influence of southern Protestant beliefs about racial differences to the history of interracial marriage in the United States. Historians need works that probe these intersections among religion, race, sexuality, and American culture. Unfortunately, this book’s flaws limit its usefulness.

Almighty God Created the Races tries to answer two related but distinct questions: First, how did religious ideas and arguments shape antimiscegenation laws in the United States? Second, what role did American ideals of religious freedom play in the campaign to end restrictions on interracial marriage? Botham argues that religion was determinative in both cases. Southern Protestant ideas about racial separateness undergirded the defense of slavery and subsequent rationales for banning interracial sex and marriage. “The attorneys and judges who argued for antimiscegenation laws,” she contends, “employed Protestant theologies of marriage and separate races to bolster their legal arguments” (131). Given the overwhelming predominance of Protestants on the bench, that claim hardly seems surprising, but Botham’s contribution is to tease out how deeply certain Protestant theological interpretations penetrated American jurisprudence on marriage. Botham argues that, by contrast, Roman Catholic doctrines of racial equality and marital freedom proved crucial to a court case that laid the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of state bans on interracial marriage. These arguments give too much causative weight to theology at the expense of social, cultural, and political history, but they nevertheless result in some insights.

Botham begins with an intriguing premise: that we owe the ultimate dismantling of antimiscegenation laws in the United States to Roman Catholic theologies of marriage and race. In 1947 a county clerk in Los Angeles denied Sylvester Davis Jr. and Andrea Perez a marriage license because Davis was identified as African American and Perez, whose family was of Mexican ancestry, was considered white. Davis and Perez, who were Catholic, hired Daniel Marshall, a lawyer who was both Catholic and liberal, to take their case to the California Supreme Court. Marshall argued that California’s antimiscegenation law denied the religious freedoms of interracial Catholic couples who wanted to participate in what Catholic theology defined as the holy sacrament of marriage. Chief Justice Roger Traynor, who wrote the majority opinion in Perez v. Sharp (which Botham identifies by its less common name, Perez v. Lippold), largely ignored Marshall’s first amendment argument; Botham concedes that “religious freedom . . . did not even make a ‘blip’ on Traynor’s ‘radar screen’ in terms of having any real importance to the case” (42). Botham is intrigued, however, by a concurring opinion, in which one justice agreed with Marshall that the first amendment protected the rights of interracial Catholic couples to marry. Botham argues that because the concurring opinion tipped the court to a 4–3 majority, the case “pivot[ed] on the axis of religious liberty” (49).

More plausible is the argument that Peggy Pascoe made in What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America: that Marshall prevailed in Perez in spite of his religious liberty arguments. Marshall instead piqued the court’s interest when he pointed out that most of the cases that the state of California cited as precedence for its antimiscegenation law were steeped in the increasingly discredited logic of race science. As Botham notes, Marshall pressed this point with comparisons to the race science employed in Nazi Germany; the lawyer for the state strained to explain why interracial marriages produced offspring…

The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán

Stanford University Press
2009
456 pages
39 tables, 4 figures, 13 illustrations, 11 maps.
Cloth ISBN: 9780804749831

Matthew Restall, Professor of Latin American History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The Black Middle is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatán, which is today part of southern Mexico. The study is based on Spanish and Maya-language documents from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives (mostly in Spain and Mexico). Restall’s goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecáns (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. He concludes that in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between—but closely connected to—Mayas and Spaniards. The book’s “black middle” thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.

Jackie Kay @ 5×15

5×15
2012-10-16

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Five speakers, fifteen minutes each. True stories of passion, obsession and adventure recounted live with just two rules: no scripts and only fifteen minutes each.

The Red Dust Road

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University. Her experiences of growing up inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her other collections include Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007) and The Lamplighter (2008). Her collection of poetry for children, Red, Cherry Red (2007) won the 2008 CLPE Poetry Award. Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Award. She has also published three collections of short stories: Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and her latest book, Reality, Reality (2012). Her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), a memoir about meeting her Nigerian birth father, which was short-listed for the 2011 PEN/Ackerley Prize. Jackie Kay was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.

Black Mom + Indian Dad = Search for Identity

Ebony Magazine
2012-12-17

Sharda Sekaran

Sharda Sekaran can’t deny her East Indian roots, but she can’t find them either

It was my senior year of college. I sat at the end of a long oval table in a meeting room in one of the academic buildings. Surrounding me on either side were professors from different departments. Some of them I’d taken classes from, but most I had not. They were interviewing me for a fellowship for which I’d been nominated. It was a very selective process, and only three other students from my school were up for it.

I’m generally okay speaking under pressure in front of a group, but I was absolutely terrified. The professors asked my about my identity—my understanding of who I am and where I came from. I felt paralyzed by fear, and stumbled like a desperate entertainer trying to keep the audience on her side.

I could see the crestfallen face of a religion professor whom I knew wanted to like me. She watched helplessly as I spewed out one badly composed thought after another. I knew what I was saying was complete junk. I tried to distract them with academic buzzwords: “dichotomy,” “paradox,” “equilibrium,” “organic…” Nothing. All I conveyed about my identity was that I had no clue about it.

It was my own fault. The fellowship was based on self-discovery through theme-related travel for a year. The subject was meant to be of personal significance, but maybe I’d taken it too far. My topic was the gaping hole of my family grief—a search for the missing half of my cultural ancestry.

My proposal was to examine my hybrid African-American/Indian identity by studying the impact of Bollywood on the Indian Diaspora (my personal connection being, my father’s from India and my mother is African-American). I’d go to countries with Creole Indian/African mixed populations to observe how popular cinema impacted people’s idea of what makes them “Indian.”

I thought it was a good idea for a project; so did a lot of others. Thus, I found myself at the end of that table of professors. But when the panel asked me questions about Indian culture, basic things that any person with an Indian family should know, I drew blanks.

I might have saved myself by admitting that I had no relationship with my Indian-born father. He abandoned our family when I was a toddler and left me without a dad or any ties to his family. All I inherited was an Indian name and physical features that could belong in South Asia. My family history had ambiguity, but also enough clues about my origins to constantly leave me answering questions and explaining a story that’s sensitive as a wound whenever I’m forced to recount it…

Read the entire article here.

An Eagle Eye in Harlem

narratively: Local. Original. Organic. In-Depth.
2012-12-10

Jenni Monet

From Malcolm X Boulevard to pow-wow road trips, a black man from Georgia adopts a Cherokee persona despite questionable ties to any Native American roots.

Robert Banks’ one-bedroom flat is lavishly decorated with Native American artwork—sculptures and dreamcatchers that the 71-year-old Georgia native created himself. On his kitchen cupboards are hand-painted feathers with tips of burnt-orange. A grand self-portrait hangs above Banks’ dark green velvet couch, where he often sifts through pictures of his past—a family he says descends from Cherokee Indians…

Produced, shot and edited by Jenni Monet, a multimedia journalist telling stories about NYC, Native Americans and the Indigenous.

ANTH 206 American Indian Societies (FOLK 230)

University of North Carolina
Summer 2013

Why do American Indians have casinos and reservations? Who is an Indian? How do Indians feel about American history? What kinds of futures do young Indians imagine for themselves and their tribes, and how can a non-Indian participate in and contribute to building this future? Prepare for a great ride through the vigorous discussions and debates we have about these and other topics in this perspective-expanding and critical-thinking-oriented Maymester class. Through films, readings, and class discussions, students will learn about the histories of Indian tribes and about U.S. history from the perspectives of American Indians. They will also explore tribal sovereignty, reservation life, tribal leaders, Indian education, black Indians, Indian art, Indian participation in sports, and other topics in which students express interest. Classes will be discussion-based. Students will be encouraged to think critically and imaginatively in a class setting that is relaxed and informal, and the instructor’s primary motivational techniques will be positive reinforcement and encouragement. No prior study of American Indians is required.

For more information, click here.