Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation, a story of racial intimacy!

African American Registry
2012-07-20

On this date, the African American Registry discusses miscegantion.

Reference: The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage

Susan Altman

Shortly before Christmas in 1863 a 72-page pamphlet appeared for sale on newsstands in New York City. It was titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The pamphlet began with details of its title. “Miscegenation” was a word that the author had created and he explained that he had invented it by combining two Latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). The authors intended to replace the word “amalgamation,” which they felt was not scientific enough.

The pamphlet went on to give a social philosophy that by the racist standards of 1863 was highly inflammatory.

The authors wanted to promote the practice of miscegenation and encourage white and black people to have children with each other. The real authors were David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a staunchly Democratic paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter. Within months, two Democrats in the presidential election campaign of 1864 anonymously issued the same pamphlet, which appeared in the New York Times. During this time, sex across the color line was an obsession of white America, particularly the stereotype of black men’s alleged craving for white women, along with believers in Anglo-Saxon “racial” superiority who feared that “mongrelization” was degenerative.

It is a fact that black-white sex existed from the beginning of the slave trade in the 16th century, virtually always on the initiative of Europeans who held Africans in their total control. During the infamous Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, black women and children were allowed mobility on board ship so that white sailors could have unlimited sexual access to them. Sex played a role in the gradual separation of Africans from other indentured servants in Virginia upon arrival with the unique North American reality of chattel slavery, by which people were legally defined as property. The very first case in this chain was a sexual one: In 1630 Hugh Davis was sentenced by the Virginia court to a whipping “for defiling his body in lying with a Negro.” Although it was a white man who was convicted and punished for the act, the case shows the early eroticisation of racial differences…

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Equality Trouble: Sameness and Difference in Twentieth-Century Race Law

California Law Review
Volume 88, Issue 6 (2000)
pages 1923-2015

Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In this Essay, Professor Harris suggests that “race law” consists not only of antidiscrimination law, but law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups. Harris argues that a constant tension in the story of race law in the past century has been the effort to reconcile constitutional and statutory norms of equality with the desire for white dominance. In the first part of the century, it was assumed that the fact of racial difference required management through sound public policy; in the second part of the century, race gradually became understood as an arbitrary distinction that the law should ignore. Neither treating race as difference nor as sameness, however, has succeeded in accomplishing racial justice.

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Administering Identity: The Determination of Race in Race-Conscious Law

California Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 5 (1994)
pages 1231-1285

Christopher A. Ford

Modern American anti-discrimination law seeks to remedy the effects of racial and ethnic prejudice by ensuring equality in areas such as political access and employment opportunity. In this effort, the concept of race is central both to identifying and to rectifying the effects of prejudice. Various economic and social benefits, for example, are awarded based upon injuries and solutions defined with reference to racial categories. Race and ethnicity, however, are today recognized as being largely social constructs with little empirical or scientific basis. This dichotomy between the importance of race classification to anti-discrimination law and its fundamental indeterminacy creates what the author calls a core dilemma of modem race-conscious law: the difficulties of how we “administer race.” He explores two related questions bearing on this dilemma. How should the law-indeed, can the law-intelligibly define the nature and boundaries of the groups to whom remedial preferences are addressed? Furthermore, can the law “accurately” sort individuals into these groups once they have been defined? The author explores the approaches several different group conscious programs and legal regimes have taken in attempting to deal with these questions, from methods employed in sex and Native American classification to the systems of classification used in the Jim Crow South, in modem India and in South Africa during the apartheid era.

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The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought

California Law Review
Volume 85, Issue 5 (1997)
pages 1213-1258

Juan F. Perea, Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law
University of Florida

This Article is about how we are taught to think about race. In particular, I intend to analyze the role of books and texts on race in structuring our racial discourse. I believe that much writing on racism is structured by a paradigm that is widely held but rarely recognized for what it is and what it does. This paradigm shapes our understanding of what race and racism mean and the nature of our discussions about race. It is crucial, therefore, to identify and describe this paradigm and to demonstrate how it binds and organizes racial discourse, limiting both the scope and the range of legitimate viewpoints in that discourse.

In this Article, I identify and criticize one of the most salient features of past and current discourse about race in the United States, the Black/White binary paradigm of race. A small but growing number of writers have recognized the paradigm and its limiting effect on racial discourse. I believe that its dominant and pervasive character has not been well established nor discussed in legal literature.

I intend to demonstrate the existence of a Black/White paradigm and to show its breadth and seemingly pervasive ordering of racial discourse and legitimacy. Further, I intend to show how the Black/White binary paradigm operates to exclude Latinos/as from full membership and participation in racial discourse, and how that exclusion serves to perpetuate not only the paradigm itself but also negative stereotypes of Latinos/as. Full membership in society for Latinos/as will require a paradigm shift away from the binary paradigm and towards a new and evolving understanding of race and race relations.

This Article illustrates the kind of contribution to critical theory that the emergent Latino Critical Race Studies (LatCrit) movement may make. This movement is a continuing scholarly effort, undertaken by Latino/a scholars and other sympathetic scholars, to examine critically existing structures of racial thought and to identify how these structures perpetuate the subordinated position of Latinos/as in particular. LatCrit studies are, then, an extension and development of critical race theory (and critical theory generally) that focus on the previously neglected areas of Latino/a identity and history and the role of racism as it affects Latinos/as.

I identify strongly, and self-consciously, as a Latino writer and thinker. It is precisely my position as a Latino outsider, neither Black nor White, that makes possible the observation and critique presented in this Article. My critique of the Black/White binary paradigm of race shows this commonly held binary understanding of race to be one of the major impediments to learning about and understanding Latinos/as and their history. As I shall show, the paradigm also creates significant distortions in the way people learn to view Latinos/as.

I begin with a review of the principal scientific theory that describes the nature of paradigms and the power they exert over the formation of  knowledge. I then analyze important, nationally recognized books on race to reveal the binary paradigm of race and the way it structures race thinking. After reviewing these popular and scholarly books on race, I analyze a leading casebook on constitutional law. Like other books, textbooks on constitutional law are shaped by the paradigm and reproduce it. Then, by describing some of the legal struggles Latinos/as have waged, I will demonstrate that paradigmatic presentations of race and struggles for equality have caused significant omissions with undesirable repercussions. Thus, I demonstrate the important role that legal history can play in both correcting and amplifying the Black/White binary paradigm of race…

…In his chapter on “Malcolm X and Black Rage” [Cornel] West describes Malcolm X’s fear of cultural hybridity, the blurring of racial boundaries that occurs because of racial mixture. Malcolm X saw such hybridity, exemplified by mulattoes, as “symbols of  weakness and confusion.” West’s commentary on Malcolm X’s views gives us another statement of the binary paradigm: “The very idea of not ‘fitting in’ the U.S. discourse of positively valued whiteness and negatively debased blackness meant one was subject to exclusion and marginalization by whites and blacks.” Although the context of this quotation is about Black/White mulattoes, West’s observation is crucial to an understanding of why Latinos/as, neither claiming to be, nor being, White or Black, are perpetually excluded and marginalized. The reified binary structure of discourse on race leaves no room for people of color who do not fit the rigid Black and White boxes supplied by the paradigm. Furthermore, most Latinos/as are mixed race mestizos or mulattoes, who therefore embody the kind of racial mixture that Malcolm X, and, I would argue, society generally tends to reject. West’s observation about mixed-race people who do not fit within traditional U.S. discourse about race applies in full measure to Latinos/as…

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The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Volume 7, Number 2 (2010)
pages 205-216
DOI: 10.1007/s11673-010-9224-8

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism.

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Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here

Thurgood Marshall Law Review
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 79-100

Amos N. Jones, Professor of Law
Campbell University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Given Americans’ warm bipartisan response to Senator Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the realist is constrained to applaud with them. The fact that voters of all ethnicities enthusiastically back a man apparently black who, at first glance, is fairly critical of the status quo indicates that the country is more open-minded than it used to be. Once the applause has subsided, however, the realist is further constrained to take a hard look at the facts as opposed to the rhetoric accompanying Obama’s stardom. His globetrotting memoir and media appearances, while uplifting and entertaining, have proved unsatisfactory in delivering the obviously critical thinker’s original answer to the big question that has remained unaddressed since the euphoria of 2004, when numerous journalists proclaimed Obama the new black political hope: When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?

This essay contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man. After explaining the history of the “one-drop rule” given legal force by a rarely considered holding of Plessy v. Ferguson that remains good law even today, the essay criticizes the thoughtless imposition of the black label upon Obama, suggesting possible reasons for his allowing Americans to minimize or ignore his substantially more dominant white heritage. Without suggesting specific regimes for categorization, the essay concludes by arguing that the time has come for public and private law to recognize different degrees of blackness, especially now that the country’s census allows Americans to categorize themselves in more than one racial group…

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Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Duke University Press
2012
400 pages
71 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5085-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5067-5

Edited by:

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies
Duke University

Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or “snapshots,” highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
• 1. “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler
• 2. “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill
• 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach
  • Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney
• 5. Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman
• 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein
  • Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” / Suzanne Schneider
• 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace
  • Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 9. “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford
  • Snapshot 4. The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The arresting eye: Race and the detection of deception

University of Southern California
December 2005
282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3220115
ISBN: 9780542713217

Jinny Huh

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

With increasing rates of miscegenation and racially invisible bodies, how is race to be determined? This dissertation examines the dynamics and discourse of race detection through a comparative analysis of detective fiction and passing narratives, two genres that witnessed a simultaneous rise during the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the detective fiction genre in many ways prospers and responds to the anxiety of racial indecipherability by creating a systematic method of detection. By examining narratives of detection and passing written by both white and ethnic authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Earl Derr Biggers to Pauline Hopkins and Winnifred Eaton, among others, this study demonstrates that the politics and mechanics of race detection is highly specific to the eye of the gazer attuned to distinguishing the signs of race. For example, while Dupin and Holmes may exhibit mystically and supernaturally intuitive powers, Pauline Hopkins (author of the first African American detective in Hagar’s Daughter) shows that intuition and race detection is a necessary component of the African American community. On the other hand, Winnifred Eaton (the first Asian American novelist) responds to the obsession with detection by promoting a rhetoric of undetection in the emergence of Asian American fiction. Finally, in response to Eaton’s celebration of undetection within the Asian American context, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan series demonstrate the anxieties of promoting an Asian American detective hero during the height of Yellow Peril paranoia.

In addition to examining the politics of race detection in literature, this dissertation also explores how numerous disciplines formulate their own concepts of “racial knowledges” via a discourse of detection (such as film studies, visual studies, law, ethnography, and literary history). As such, through a comparative focus which encompasses multiple levels (19th/20th century, male/female, British/American, African American/Asian American, literature/film), my study also addresses the potential threat and implications of racial erasure to Ethnic Studies specifically and Civil Rights overall.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection
• Chapter Two: Intuitive Faculties and Racial Clairvoyance: Pauline Hopkins and the Emergence of Multiethnic Detective Fiction
• Chapter Three: The Legacy of Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Ambidexterity, Undetection as Guerilla Tactics, and the Emergence of Asian American Fiction
• Chapter Four: “The Jaundiced Eye”: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

New York University Press
November 2012
272 pages
10 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814765463
Paper ISBN: 9780814765470

Antonio López, Assistant Professor of English
George Washington University

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.

López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives

University of California, Los Angeles
2005
158 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3175169
ISBN: 9780542133046

Susan Elaine Bausch

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Between approximately 1880 and 1925, large numbers of legally black Americans crossed the color line and identified as white; in common parlance, they “passed.” After Reconstruction, the South attempted to legislate the separation of the races by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation and prohibited miscegenation (at least within marriage). This meant that many passers were not just violating a social taboo by crossing the color line, they were also breaking the law. Even in the North, there were some anti-miscegenation laws on the books, although convention and prejudice probably played a bigger role in limiting mixed-race marriages. In effect, these laws made it a crime for a black person to do what a white person did, which means that blackness itself was criminalized.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Imitation White and Secret Murderers: The Criminalization of Blackness in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Chapter Two: Feminine Transgressions: Crossing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
• Chapter Three: Passing for What?: Joe Christmas’s Racial Uncertainty and Criminal Fate in William Faulkner’s Light in August
• Chapter Four: A Passing Success: The Cost of Mobility in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.