Mixed Race Studies

Imitation of Life

Duke University Press
2004 (Originially published in 1933)
352 pages
6 b&w photos, 1 line drawing
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3324-1

Fannie Hurst (1889–1968)

Edited by:

Daniel Itzkovitz, Associate Professor of  American Literature and Culture
Stonehill College, North Easton, Massachusetts

A bestseller in 1933, and subsequently adapted into two beloved and controversial films, Imitation of Life has played a vital role in ongoing conversations about race, femininity, and the American Dream. Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother, rear their daughters together and become business partners. Combining Bea’s business savvy with Delilah’s irresistible southern recipes, they build an Aunt Jemima-like waffle business and an international restaurant empire. Yet their public success brings them little happiness. Bea is torn between her responsibilities as a businesswoman and those of a mother; Delilah is devastated when her light-skinned daughter, Peola, moves away to pass as white. Imitation of Life struck a chord in the 1930s, and it continues to resonate powerfully today.

The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst’s one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel’s development, and the response to the novel by Hurst’s friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, “Limitations of Life” (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race 

2007
pages 155-170 

Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College 

From the anthology: 

Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America
Michigan State University Press
2007
280 pages
6 ” x 9 ”
ISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6 

Edited by: 

Curtis Stokes, Professor of Political Philosophy and African American Thought
James Madison College of Public Affairs
Michigan State University 

Theresa A. Melendez, Associate Professor of Chicano/Chicana Literature
Michigan State University 

I begin with a brief review of how whiteness was established as a norm and context for considering initial media reports of U.S. Census data on race released in March 2001.  This is followed by reflections on the politically conservative ramifications of multiracialism and multiculturalism, which have had an exaggerated impact on popular interpretations of the census.  As a preface, it should be noted that although we are, collectively, caught in the trap of using race as a noun, race should be understood as a verb—a predicate that requires action.  People do not belong to a race but the are raced; in this context, race operates as a social fact with concrete material consequences for the manner in which experiences shape individual lives and their meaning. 

Let us take note of an overlooked but rather obvious observation: inequality is not distributed equally.  Therefore Americans of all colors and national origins need a constant reminder that Africans brought to the English colonies in the 1600s were strategically and explicitly excluded, by law and social custom, from the privileges and rights accorded English men.  This is a critical factor in how U.S. history has been shaped.  Emphasizing the unequal distribution of inequality underlines the continuities and clarifies the linkages between the past and the present.  Beginning in the colonial period, being white was perceived and defined as having certain privileges and rights, including right to citizenship,  to vote, to serve in the militia and bear arms, and to be a member of a jury.  Most important of all was the right of self-possession—in other words, he right to be identified as a free person and to act on that right.  Children of enslaved African females were legally designated as slaves and property of their masters, who often where their biological fathers.  As blackness quickly came to be associated with slave status, the law set the parameters within which, conceptually, people with African ancestors would be legally and socially identified as Negroes (Fields 1990)… 

…In sum, the multiracial movement has successfully blurred the lines between two very different forms of identifying: public self-identification and personal or private plural identities. From Elk magazine to Seventeen and ABC to MTV, the notion of mixed-race and multiracial identities is given positive visibility as a celebration of how much America is changing. Curiously, this multimedia arena has neglected a discussion of the limitations of a notion of multiracialism that refers only to children whose parents are raced differently. In fact, the campaign for a multiracial category completely obscures the fact that black or African American is already a multiracial category. Patricia Williams skillfully interprets this phenomenon when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial. The use of the term seems to privilege the offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance the social status of us mixed-up products of the illegitimacies of the not so distanct past” (1997, 53)…

Read the entire chapter here.

The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities

The Sociological Review
Volume 53, Issue 3 (August 2005)
pages 476–494
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2005.00562.x

Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey

The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner-city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children’s interracial identities. The article’s emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.

Read or purchase the article here.

U.S. more diverse than ever: Census

The Toronto Star
2010-12-23

Timothy R. Homan
Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON—The ethnic makeup of the world’s largest economy will be increasingly diverse, with more mixed-race Americans, according to the head of the U.S. Census Bureau.

“This is the decade of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama, where we talked about race combinations,” Robert Groves, director of the federal agency, said about forthcoming 2010 Census data in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt”. “I can’t wait to see the pattern of responses on multiple races. That’ll be a neat indicator to watch.”

The 2010 Census was the second consecutive decennial count to allow residents to identify as more than one race, and Groves said it’s likely that more respondents checked off multiple races.

The nation’s population grew 9.7 per cent to 308,745,538 in 2010, from the previous decade, with the fastest gains coming in the South and West, the agency said this week. The release included only national and state population figures, with more data on race, ethnicity, housing and other variables provided in February and March for all levels of geography…

Read the entire article here.

The New Nadir: The Political Economy of the Contemporary Black Racial Formation

The Black Scholar
2010-03-22

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

IN “THE NEW NADIR: The Political Economy of the Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” using the Marxist method of historical materialism analyze the period after Turner’s investigation, that is, from the early 1990s to the present. Like Turner and Mendenhall, attend to history, economy, politics, and ideology. I explore how the transformation to financialized global racial capitalism has structured the lives of contemporary African Americans. My main thesis is that the transformation to a new capitalist accumulation structure has reversed or mitigated most of the socioeconomic, but not the political gains achieved by the civil rights and Black Power movements. In the context of the pivotal events in the transformation of the U.S. and world political economies, I highlight four seminal events in the construction of the New Nadir. They are: (1) the suppression of black voters in Florida in the 2000 presidential election; (2) the racialized social catastrophe caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; (3) the devastating loss of African American wealth due to the subprime foreclosure crisis in 2007; and (4) the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president in 2008. These events illustrate the contradictory nature of the contemporary black racial formation. Dividing the effects on African America into their primary economic and political impacts, I explore ten major transformations that financialized global racial capitalism has wrought on African America. Like Mendenhall and Turner, I suggest that the way forward from this moment of devastation, rollback, and retreat lies through a (re)engagement with Marxism. Until capitalism can be destroyed, what is needed are fully developed black Marxist critiques of “the paradox of the contemporary conjuncture” and the construction of radical strategies for black liberation and social transformation in the age of financialized global racial capitalism.

ON MAY 9, 1865, Frederick Douglass addressed the last meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In an atmosphere bursting with excitement and pride of accomplishment, Douglass offered a cautionary note. He speculated that emancipation would witness the metamorphosis, rather than the end of “Slavery.” According to Douglass:

“Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names. It has been called ‘the peculiar institution,’ ‘the social system,’ and the ‘impediment.’ It has been called by a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name; and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.”

Douglass knew slavery was merely one form through which a more fundamental and durable phenomenon manifested itself. Though he did not name it, Douglass was conceptualizing black racial oppression, the systematic, pervasive, and persistent domination of people of African descent in the United States of America. (1)

Black racial oppression has undergone three transformations since Douglass observed its chameleon-like capacity to transform itself. (2) The contemporary black racial formation, the New Nadir is a consequence of the transformation to financialized global racial capitalism, a new stage of capitalist accumulation which is characterized by three interconnected processes: globalization of production and markets; neoliberal(ism) social policies; and financialization, the shift of investment from production to monetary “products.” (3)…

…The repudiation of “blackness” or African American identity is another significant aspect of the political fragmentation occurring within African America. The ideological assault “blackness” is rooted in colorblind racial ideology and its desire to promote a post-black identity or allegedly to move beyond race. The push to transcend racial identity is a joint project of two overlapping sets of political actors, neoconservatives and the bi- or multiracial identity movement. This collective enterprise has alternatively challenged the use of racial categories in public policy, research, college admissions, and in employment. Yet they have also labored to expand the racial categories on the census and throughout U.S. society, further undermining racial political solidarity. The mixed-race identity movement casts African American identity as an atavistic essentialism, a fiction based totally on the notion of hypodescent or the “one drop rule.” Mixed-race philosopher Naomi Zack and other leaders of the multiracial movement suggest that African Americans have colluded with Euro-Americans to suppress “mixed-race” persons’ right to “self-identification” and “selfhood,” by denying them the right to embrace the fullness of their parental background or “racial” heritage. Rather than constitute a move to destroy racial categories, the creation of a bi- and multiracial classification represents an attempt to construct a new “racial” group. To shift the U.S. biracial classificatory schema and racial order to a multiracial system would locate light-skinned persons of mixed race in a space above African Americans, and perhaps Latinos/as, Asian Americans, but definitely below whites. It would represent what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “the Latin Americanization of racial classification in the USA.” (39)

GIVEN ITS ASPIRATIONS, it is ironic that the multiracial identity movement is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, specifically three of its partial successes, Loving v. Virginia (1967), Affirmative Action, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act and its 1988 enhancements. The Loving decision abolished miscegenation law. Affirmative Action provided a generation of African Americans greater access to education and to newly created positions in the expanding technical-managerial sectors of the U.S. political economy or business set-asides for their entrepreneurial ventures. The 1968 Fair Housing Act provided a mechanism for exacerbating the class-based spatial division within African America. It also owes much to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated the nationality quotas that were legislated by the 1924 Immigration Act.

According to historian Minkah Makalani: (40)

“Following 1967, when anti-miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, more than one million persons were born of mixed parentage in the United States. In the 1990s alone, these births (more than 300,000) were 1.4 percent of total U.S. births, 8.9 percent of all births with at least one black parent, and 43 percent of all births with parents from two different racial groups. On the 2000 U.S. census, only 784,764 persons (0.6 percent of the U.S. population) marked black and white as their racial designation.”

In 2000, the census identified only 784,764 individuals as having one black parent and one non-black parent. Additionally, bi- or multiracial-identified individuals constituted only about 2.1 percent of the 36.4 million African American people. This meager figure is not surprising, since exogamy among blacks is extremely low—6 percent for men and 2 percent for women. Nor is it surprising that 43 percent of such individuals are the product of a relationship between a black and a white person. Asians and Latinos/as, regardless of nationality, rarely marry or have children with African Americans or other blacks in the United States. Sociologist Steven Steinberg discovered that 40 percent of the children of Asian immigrants and a third of U.S. born Latinos/as between ages twenty-five and thirty-four marry non-Latino whites. In truth, the African American and black communities in the U.S. remain shockingly inassimilable. Generally, only other blacks find African Americans, West Indians, and Africans worth marrying. Given the smallness of their numbers, why has the contemporary mixed-race phenomenon received so much scholarly and popular attention? (41)

THE MIXED-RACE issue among African Americans derives its significance from its class and ideological implications for the new black racial formation, not its size. The fact is that a disproportionate number of those adopting this designation or having it thrust upon them are middle-class. Like Africans and Caribbean blacks, individuals identified as mixed-race seem to be supplanting those designated as African American in high profile economic, social, and political positions. This is especially so with student admissions at the nation’s elite universities and increasingly so among the professoriate and the intelligentsia. In many ways, it represents a return to a pre-Black Power intraracial class hierarchy. Given the material conditions of black racial oppression and the contemporary racial ideology of colorblindness, this move would result in further solidifying the historic relationship between light skin color and class in the African American community. Correspondingly, it would further fracture its already frayed class relations. Several scholars have documented the legacy of the color-class connection in African American history. Richard Seltzer and Robert Smith, for instance, have demonstrated that, “the black community continues to exhibit a degree of class stratification based on color, with lighter-skin blacks exhibiting higher education and occupational attainments.” A successful multiracial identity project would make it easier for a comparably wealthy sector of African American society to adopt conservative political positions supporting their privileged economic status, rather than policies more closely linked to that of the black majority…

Read the entire article here.

Making Multiracials: State, Family, And Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line [Book Review]

The Black Scholar
2010-03-22

Alexes Harris, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Washington

Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, by Kimberly McClain DaCosta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007; $30.95, paper, 280 pp; ISBN 10 0-80475546-9).

THIS THOUGHT-PROVOKING book addresses several interesting and important questions about the relatively recent emergence of a multiracial movement in the United States. In Making Multiracials, DaCosta explores a unique racial and ethnic project in the making and asks how and why has a group of people who have been largely invisible to and isolated from one another mobilized for a new census classification? Using a purposively drawn sample of 62 individuals including those who have mixed-race ancestry and those who are in mixed-race relationships, and ethnographic observations of group activities and events around multiracial identity, DaCosta finds that mixed-race individuals become members of multiracial organizations for a sense of belonging, a safe space, and to reflect on their shared experiences…

Read the entire review here.

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté [Book Review]

H-France Review (Society for French Historical Studies)
Volume 8, Number 162 (November 2008)
pages 654-657

Marie-Paule Ha
The University of Hong Kong

Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2007. 335 pp. Notes and bibliography. 24€. ISBN 978-2-7071-3982-5.

While the question of métissage has in the last two decades generated a significant volume of scholarly works from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, Emmanuelle Saada’s monograph, which grew out of her 2001 doctoral dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, is quite unique in that it provides the first systematic and in-depth investigation of the judicial aspects of what was referred to as “la question métisse.”[1] Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from archival and juridical sources to works from legal studies, history, anthropology and sociology, the author reconstructs the highly complex and tortuous trajectory that transformed the legal status of the empire’s métis from that of native subjects to being French citizens during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Given the book’s focus, the term “métis” in Les Enfants de la colonie is used to refer not to mixed-race children in general, but to the métis non reconnus, that is, those born out of wedlock that had not been legally recognized by their European fathers and were abandoned by them. As a result, this group of métis was given by default the status of native subjects. It was the plight of this particular category of illegitimate and racially mixed progeny of European men that became the object of the interventions of administrators, philanthropists and legal professionals in the colonies.

The starting point of Saada’s investigation of “the métis problem” is the 8 November 1928 decree which made it possible for the métis non reconnus born in Indochina to be granted French citizenship if one of their parents, legally unknown, could be presumed to be of “French race.” According to the decree, this presumption could be established “par tous les moyens,” which include “le nom que porte l’enfant, le fait qu’il a reçu une formation, une éducation et une culture françaises, sa situation dans la société” (p.13). The momentous interest of this legal text was twofold. On the one hand, it constituted the first occurrence of the word “race” in French legislation. On the other hand, the term was deployed not for an exclusive purpose, but rather to justify the integration of certain subjects of the empire in French citizenry…

Read the entire review here.

Identity, Discrimination and Violence in Bessie Head’s Trilogy

University of South Africa
November 2002
71 pages

Corwin Luthuli Mhlahlo

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the subject of English

This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head’s trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality.

Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation.

Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exists between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed.  In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society.

Read the entire thesis here.

Author Interview: Neela Vaswani

Sarabane Books
2010-07-19

The lovely Neela Vaswani takes a moment to chat with us about her new book, You Have Given Me a Country, out August 15 [2010].

Your previous book, Where the Long Grass Bends, was a collection of short stories with a strongly mythic cast, and your memoir is told in meticulously rendered vignettes. How did you move from fashioning fiction out of the tales of your childhood, to turning your childhood and young adulthood into a (nonfiction) tale?

When I write in any genre, the raw materials and techniques are the same—it’s just the approach that differs. Early in the book I say, “I pledge allegiance to story,” and that’s what I always aim to do, to honor the simplest and most valuable truth at the heart of any story…

Your background is Indian- and Irish-American—two intensively chronicled, often romanticized, identities. When the personal has so much overlap with the familiar, how did you confront the challenge of making your experiences read as yours?

The simplest thing I did was to focus on the particular way I see the world—as me, Neela, rather than as someone who is “half Indian, half Irish.”  Still, I had some negotiating to do.

At first, it was difficult for me to explore my Indian-American identity without falling into the same story-patterns and language as other Indian-American writers. I felt that same caution when writing about biracial identity; there has been so much written, especially recently, about our identity and experience. I wanted to try to speak from those traditions and shared experiences while also telling my story in a fresh way…

Read the entire review here.

Where The Long Grass Bends

Sarabande Books
2004-01-01
192 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-889330-96-9

Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University

Debut collection from a lyrical writer of Indian and Irish descent.

Fervent. Lyrical. Animistic. Incantatory… Where the Long Grass Bends succumbs to no summary. It is a debut collection of stories that is boundless, even boundary-less, because Neela Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks at nothing. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative forms by employing Indian lore (from Hindu to Sufi), Gaelic fable, and historical legend. These are impossible tales, dreaming yet mired in the everyday grit of ordinary life, and told so beautifully that the beginnings and endings of reality and imagination disappear.

In “Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh,” a tomb is opened on Thursdays to women possessed by spirits; a young boy, Nanak, helps his bewitched mother with her particular spirit’s demand by journeying across town to fetch a salty lassi with plenty of pepper and mint. In “Bolero,” Felix and his grandfather, Aitor, play violin and piano throughout a World War II air strike, and in “Twang (Release),” a young girl living in the woods amid wild fox and birch finds her way to the shore, ending up adrift for months in the ocean with the first (and only) man she sees.

Spare, fierce, and absolutely unpredictable, Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. Easy to hold onto but impossible to pin down, each story is an act of surrender, a folkloric revision similar to the achievements of Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Angela Carter, but unlike anything you’ve ever read.