Mixed Race Studies

A New Look At The Life Of Jean Toomer

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2010-12-30

Robert Siegel, Host

Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Emory University

Jean Toomer received much acclaim for his portrait of African-American life in the early 20th century in his 1923 book Cane. The Harlem Renaissance author wrote vivid vignettes in a series of poems and short stories in the book. Next week, the book will be re-released with a new introduction written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Emory University scholar Rudolph Byrd. In the 70-page introduction, the two scholars write that Toomer, a light-skinned black man of mixed heritage, chose to live much of his life as a black man passing as white. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Byrd about the life of Toomer.

Jean Toomer was a writer whose 1923 book “Cane” wove poetry, prose and drama into its glimpses of African-American life in the early 20th century. “Cane” earned him a place among the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and a new edition of the book has a different take on Toomer’s life.

Toomer was a light-skinned man who spoke of himself as being neither white nor black. Well, two scholars of African-American literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard and Professor Rudolph Byrd of Emory University contribute an introduction to the new book, which is to be published next week.

And they conclude that Toomer – his writings notwithstanding – lived much of his life as a black man passing for white. Their investigation is one of both textual criticism and genealogical research.

Professor Byrd joins us now. Professor Gates is not with us because his father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., passed away this week, and we send our condolences.

Professor Byrd, welcome to the program.

Professor RUDOLPH BYRD (African-American Studies, Emory University): Mr. Siegel, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

SIEGEL: And your conclusions are based on both facts and a reading of those facts. First, what did you find out?

Prof. BYRD: Oh, the newly unearthed facts are in census records. There’s a draft registration and his marriage license. The census records list Toomer as white. The draft registrations record Toomer as Negro. And then, the marriage license lists both the bride and groom as white.

What is fascinating about these findings is that, first of all, this is information that has been overlooked, and so it adds an important dimension to the long speculation about Toomer’s racial ancestry, which really began with the publication of “Cane” in 1923.

SIEGEL: Now, Toomer, in writings, distanced himself from the label Negro.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: But he did speak of lots of different blood that flowed in his veins.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: And he described himself as someone who had spent some years of his life – as they said in the day – in colored schools…

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: …and many years living as white.

Is that accurate? Is his description of how he grew up accurate?

Prof. BYRD: It is and it isn’t. He did attend Henry Highland Garnet School, which was a black school. He did attend Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, which was a black school…

Read the article here.  Listen to the interview (00:05:44) here.

Ethnic identity, ego identity, and psychological well-being among mixed-ethnic Arab-European adolescents in Israel

British Journal of Developmental Psychology
Volume 24, Issue 4 (November 2006)
pages 669–679
DOI: 10.1348/026151005X59196

Hisham Motkal Abu-Rayya
The Unit of Psychology
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

This study explored the relationship between ethnic identity, ego identity, and psychological wellbeing among mixed-ethnic adolescents with European mothers and Arab fathers in Israel. One hundred and twenty-seven mixed-ethnic adolescents (13 to 18 years) were instructed to respond to a modified version of Phinney’s (1992) Multigroup ethnic identity measure (MEIM), to Bennion and Adams’ (1986) ego identity measure (EOM-EIS) and to Ryff’s (1999) psychological well-being scale. It was found that Arab and European ethnic identities, composed of ethnic behaviours, affirmation and belonging, and achievement of a sense of oneself as part of an ethnic group, were significantly positively correlated with participants’ psychological well-being. Findings revealed also that the ego identity statuses Achievement and Moratorium were associated with higher levels of psychological well-being, while the statuses Foreclosure and Diffusion were associated with lower levels of well-being. Arab and European ethnic identities and ego identity were found to be formed independently among the participants.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation

Brown University
May 2009
268 pages

Marisela Jiménez Ramos

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

On January 31, 2006, the Associated Press reported that while remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city on the Yucatan peninsula, construction workers stumbled upon a sixteenth-century cemetery containing what seemed to be the oldest archeological evidence of African slavery in the Americas. The cemetery had been in use as early as the mid-sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. That same day, the New York Times published an article about the discovery that focused on the teeth that had been unearthed by archeologists. At least four of the 180 bodies that were recovered showed evidence of having come from West Africa, including the most telling fact that “some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.” In January of 2006 the evidence of early African slavery in New Spain (now Mexico) was finally making “big news” in the modern world. But, for the historians, archeologists, anthropologists, or cultural investigators who have dug through dusty colonial documents in many of Mexico’s archives or have mined the world histories and local memories of Mexico’s “third root,” the news that there had been Africans in Mexico was hardly news. Scholars have always known that Mexico, along with all of the other Spanish colonies, had a comprehensive fully actualized system of African slavery. Two days after the initial AP news release, Mexico City’s El Universal and La Reforma carried the story.  What these and subsequent news articles reveal is the prevalent and dominant discourse of mestizaje—defined as the mixture of Spanish and Indian elements—and the obscurity of Mexico’s African history.

In El Universal, the director of the project, Vera Tiesler from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, reported that “the most important thing is to create a consciousness that we [Mexicans] not only originate from Indians and Europeans, but that there is also a third root.” Tiesler also commented that the discovery was especially important for Blacks in the United States because it provides further evidence of their arrival to the New World.  Underlying the language of the “rediscovery” of Mexico’s ancient Black population is the dominant discourse of mestizaje—Mexico’s ideology of racial mixture and national identity.  A major feature of this ideology is that “the African, under no circumstance persevered as pure black, either biologically or culturally.” Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of Black Mexican studies, expressed the common attitude of Mexicans who believed that “the slaves who contributed to Mexico’s genetic make-up became so completely integrated into the process of mestizaje that it is now very difficult for the layman to distinguish the Negroid features of the present population as a whole.” Our current understanding of racial mixture in Mexico does not negate the fact that Blacks were present in that country. If the African presence and influence is not obvious, it is not any less important historically. Blacks in Mexico have “disappeared” as a separate racial/ethnic group, to the point that nothing Black or African is considered Mexican. Yet, what is lacking is a clear explanation for the “disappearance” of the contributions that Blacks have made to our current understanding of Mexican identity.

The story of those bones in Campeche can be brought to life with a better understanding of the development of Mexican national identity. In this work I focus on nineteenth-century discourses of race and their intersection with nation-building and the exclusion of Blackness from what would eventually be termed, “mestizaje.” Since my purpose is not so much to understand what Mexico’s national identity is (or was), as to understand how and why it came to exclude all things Black and African, I focus my research on the period between Independence in 1821 and the the Porfiriato (1876-1911) when nationalism and national identity became a state-sponsored project. Historians like Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo have claimed that the modern nationalist project in Mexico began with the period of the Porfiriato and culminated with the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)—an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet, even before the beginning of the Porfiriato, I argue, “Mexican” identity had already been defined to a large degree. The nineteenth century period marks the beginning of Mexico’s political and social liberation from Spanish rule, as well as the beginning of a self-conscious
process of nation-building…

My goal is to make clear the role of Blacks and Blackness in nineteenth-century Mexican discourses of nation and to document their contributions to the makeup of mestizaje. I focus on what Florencia Mallón calls “discursive transformation.” Prasenjit Duara explains, “the meanings of the nation are produced mainly through linguistic mechanisms.” In reality, Blacks “disappeared” through omission from nineteenth-century discourses of race and nation, a process I call the Black exception, a term that highlights how Blacks were exempt from Mexico’s understanding of its own racial makeup.

By looking into the role of Blackness, or negritud, in nineteenth-century discourses of nation I seek to formulate a new understanding of Mexico’s national identity, but primarily a new theoretical understanding of ethnic relations in the period after independence. I investigate the social and political processes that contributed to the eventual—but by no means inevitable—‘disappearance’ of Blacks and all things African from the national self-consciousness of modern Mexico. To be more precise, I provide answers to the following questions. In the absence of racial categories in post-independence Mexico how did the understanding of what it meant to be Black change for former Blacks and for non-Blacks? More importantly, how did these definitions fit within the evolving concept of “lo Mejicano”?

I argue that Mexico’s twentieth-century struggles for social and political development cannot be understood without examining the role that nineteenth-century racial ideologies played in the institutionalization of official and unofficial conceptions of citizenship and nation-building. I hope to show how the historical record may be mined for evidence of the conflicting ideologies determining the context of the roles that Blacks would play—or would not be allowed to play—in the new nation. In addition to a reconceptualization of the discourse of mestizaje, this research will open avenues to a rethinking of the contemporary identity of Mexicans, including a recovery of the (obscured) Black presence…

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Curriculum Vitae
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Blackness of Slavery: Race in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1821
• Chapter 2: Inventing Mexico: Race and the Discourse of Independence
• Chapter 3: Mexico Mestizo: Nation and the Discourse of Race
• Chapter 4: Freedom Across the Border: U.S. Fugitive Slave Migration and the Discourse of Mexican Racial Equality, 1821-1866
• Chapter 5: The Cultural Meaning of Blackness: The Strange But True Adventures of “La Mulata de Córdoba” and “El Negrito Poeta”
• Chapter 6: Yanga: Mexico’s First Revolutionary
• Conclusion: “Where Did The Blacks Go?”

Read the entire dissertation here.

On “Mulatto”

Modern American Poetry
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson

From Langston Hughes (Twayne, 1967)
James A. Emanuel

This dramatic dialogue offers a tensely individualized conflict between father and son that is hardened by the vigor and scorn of the words and broadened by carefully placed, suggestive details from nature. The son’s adamant voice opens the poem, but is transformed into a passive Negro feminine presence exuberantly recalled by the white father, who feels half-pleasurably nagged in his fancied return to the conception and infancy of his son. The poet, employing the past awakened in the white man, leaves him musing and moves the growing child swiftly through years of hostile rejection by his white half-brothers—implying virtual estrangement from his father, whom he no longer reminds of sexual freedom in the Negro quarter….

A Comparison of Langston Hughes’s “The Mulatto” and Claude McKay’s “Mulatto”

2007
John Claborn

Reading McKay’s traditional poetics alongside his contemporary Langston Hughes’s open-form, experimental poetics brings out the specificity of the sonnet’s formalizing force. Consider Hughes’s “Mulatto” (1927) and McKay’s earlier 1925 sonnet, “The Mulatto.” Since slavery, the problem of the mulatto child disavowed by his/her white father-master has been a site of intense emotion and trauma—a problem that these two poems address head-on from the perspective of the mulatto son. Hughes’s “Mulatto” embraces a hybrid form structured by interpolations, multiple voices, and polyphony—in short, the poem is “mulatto” in form as well as content…

Read both essays here.

Mulatto [Poem]

1927
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

I am your son, white man!
Georgia dusk
And the turpentine woods.
One of the pillars of the temple fell.

You are my son!
Like Hell!
The moon over the turpentine woods.
The Southern night
Full of stars,
Great big yellow stars.

What’s a body but a toy?

Juicy bodies
Of nigger wenches
Blue black
Against black fences.
O, you little bastard boy,
What’s a body but a toy?
The scent of pine wood stings the soft night air.

What’s the body of your mother?
Silver moonlight everywhere.

What’s the body of your mother?
Sharp pine scent in the evening air.

A nigger night,
A nigger joy,
A little yellow
Bastard boy.
Naw, you ain’t my brother.
Niggers ain’t my brother.
Not ever.
Niggers ain’t my brother.
The Southern night is full of stars,
Great big yellow stars.

O, sweet as earth,
Dusk dark bodies
Give sweet birth
To little yellow bastard boys.

Git on back there in the night,
You ain’t white
The bright stars scatter everywhere.
Pine wood scent in the evening air.

A nigger night,
A nigger joy.
I am your son, white man!

A little yellow
Bastard boy.

SOCY 57: Identity and Social Interaction of Multiracial Americans

Dartmouth College
Department of Sociology
Upper Division

Currently being taught as of Spring 2011

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

The 2000 Census revealed that nearly 4% of youth and 2% of adult Americans belong to more than one racial category. What are the social, historical, and biological meanings of the term multi-racial? What are the challenges and benefits associated with belonging to more than one race group? How do multi-racial youth negotiate the path to developing a healthy identity differently than mono-racial youth? How has the social context of race changed the way multiracial people identify? We will consider how schools, families, peer groups, and neighborhoods influence the development of biracial Americans. (Course syllabus)

Passage to identity is still a struggle

Kansas City Star
2010-12-17

Commentary by: Jeneé Osterheldt

I’ve always known I wasn’t white like my mama. Even as a little girl, I could feel adults stare as we passed by.

I was different. But was I black like my daddy? It took me much of my young life to figure that out.

Earlier this year, we took the census. The hardest of the 10 questions revolved around racial identity.

President Barack Obama, born to a white mother and a black father from Africa, checked one box: Black, African Am. or Negro.

I checked it, too. But I also marked the ones next to white and Native American. The president and I are both mixed.

So, who chose the right answer?

More and more black-and-white mixed Americans are “passing” for black, according to a recent study in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, titled “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans.” That’s a reverse form of what biracial and fair-skinned blacks did in the Jim Crow era, when they denied their race altogether.

It’s claptrap. Yes, Obama is mixed, but he’s also black. It’s possible to be both. How can people “pass” for something they already are?..

Read the rest of the commentary here.

Chapter One: Barbara Jordan: American Hero

New York Times
1998-12-13

Mary Beth Rogers

Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, (New York: Bantam, 1998).

BARBARA CHARLINE JORDAN was born February 21, 1936, the third daughter and last child of Benjamin Meredith and Arlyne Patten Jordan. The fortunes of Ben and Arlyne were good enough to pay Dr. Thelma Patten, a relative of Arlyne’s father, John Ed, to deliver the baby at home instead of in Houston’s charity hospital, where the first two Jordan girls had been born. Ben Jordan saw his daughter almost immediately after the delivery, and his first comment was, “Why is she so dark?”

From that moment, skin and body—color, hue, texture, size, condition—began to determine who Barbara Jordan was and how she reacted to her life. She learned quite early that the degree of blackness for a black child mattered. It mattered to her father, and it mattered in the white world, which would be beyond her imagination until she was almost an adult. It also mattered in the black world, her world, the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, and would hit her with full force when she was in the all-black Phillis Wheatley High School in the early 1950s. There, her color, her size, her hair texture, and her features would determine and limit her choices. “Color-struck” teachers favored light-skinned students, who were given the honors and awards, the opportunities for college and jobs. They even escaped the harshness of encounters with the white law. A common saying in the African American neighborhoods was, “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence.”…

The pain of being a dark-skinned female goes back to slavery and intensified with Reconstruction. The preferential treatment of lighter-skinned, mixed-race African Americans by whites had “laid the groundwork for a pattern of color classism in black America.” It was the lighter-skinned African Americans who had the first opportunities for education and the benefits of freedom in post-Reconstruction America. Certain churches, neighborhoods, colleges, sororities and fraternities, social clubs, even political clubs, harbored a light-colored elite. At one time African Americans had their own “Blue Vein Society“; admission to this Nashville group depended on skin color. An applicant had to be fair enough for the spidery network of purplish veins at the wrist to be visible to a panel of expert judges.

The separate social and educational paths taken by light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans during Reconstruction divided their world. By the turn of the century, the light-skinned mulattos were the intellectual and political leaders. They were the doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, and entertainers, admired and emulated by the rest.

The prevalence of skin prejudice began to weaken after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and all but disappeared in the African American community with the resurgence of black pride in the 1960s and 1970s. But even before black pride, before “Black is beautiful,” before “I am somebody,” Barbara Jordan got comfortable with herself. By the time she was in the third grade, in 1944, she knew in her guts that she was somebody special. It did not matter to her how black she was. If someone didn’t like her because of her color, she just thought, “Well, those are stupid people, and I don’t have time to deal with them.” Quite early, she had the self-confidence to transcend the limits of her body, whether imposed by color, culture, physical capability—or stupidity! It was a pattern of being and behavior that stayed with her until the day she died. To all who thought that black was not as good as white, her retort was, “That’s a colossal lie!”

Read the rest of the chapter here.

White/Minority Multiraciality: An Exploration of Sociopolitical Consciousness Development

California State University, Sacramento
Spring 2009
118 pages

Melody Marie Antillon Hazzard

Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento

There is contention in multiracial studies as to whether multiracial people perpetuate or challenge the current racial hierarchy. This study explores the sociopolitical consciousness of white/minority multiracial people. The themes explored are the connection between the personal and the political, and the positive and negative impacts of passing on dominant culture identification and worldview. Participants had ambivalent attitudes regarding personal attitudes about racial identity and their relationship to the sociopolitical issues. Exploration into the issue of passing suggests that there are new ways to think about the concept. Also included are a discussion about the implications for practice and suggestions for further research.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. THE PROBLEM
  • Introduction
  • Background of the Problem
  • Statement of the Research Problem
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Theoretical Framework
  • Definition of Terms
  • Assumptions
  • Justification
  • Limitations
• 2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Introduction
  • The Sociopolitical History of Multiracial Individuals in the United States
  • Multiracial Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, and Current Events
  • The Current State of Whiteness
  • Psychosocial Concerns and Realities of Multiracial Individuals
  • Summary
• 3. METHODOLOGY
  • Introduction
  • Research Question
  • Research Design
  • Study Participants
  • Sample Population
  • Instrumentation
  • Data Gathering Procedures
  • Data Analysis
  • Protection of Human Subjects
  • Summary
• 4. DATA ANALYSIS
  • Introduction
  • Ambivalent Attitudes
  • Positive Effects of Passing on Dominant Culture Identification and Worldview
  • Negative Effects of Passing on Dominant Culture Identification and Worldview
  • Summary
• 5. CONCLUSIONS
  • Conclusions
  • Recommendations
  • Limitations
  • Implications for Social Work Practice and Policy
  • Conclusion
• Appendix A. Interview Questions
• Appendix B. Consent to Participate as a Research Subject
• References

Read the entire thesis here.

Color outside the lines

Columbia Missourian
2006-06-11

Sara Fernández Cendon

The boundaries between traditional racial categories shift as more people identify themselves as multiracial. The term adds another dimension to the complex issue of race in America.

Some say Tiger Woods started it all.

After winning the Masters Tournament in 1997, the golf star described himself as “Cablinasian” — as in Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian.

Colin Powell, a light-skinned black man, quickly dismissed Wood’s invention.

“In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you’re black,” Powell said.

Woods says “Cablinasian” honors his multiracial heritage. In 1997 he told Oprah Winfrey that being identified solely as an African-American bothered him. But others, who agree with Colin Powell, believe Woods will always be thought of as black and treated as such.

The Woods-Powell disagreement illustrates the deep rift between those who believe that race is a biological category and those who believe it is a political one. As more mixed-race couples join Woods’ camp by identifying their children as “multiracial,” or even “white,” civil rights groups worry about the loss of historical racial categories.

Critics of the multiracial label believe the American racial landscape is still dominated by the “one-drop” rule, which held that a person with just one black ancestor was still black. Their argument is that you don’t need much “color” to be a “person of color.” Discrimination affects people of color, they say, regardless of how light their skin might be or how they identify themselves racially…

…AGAINST THE MULTIRACIAL LABEL

David Brunsma

White people have made disparaging racial comments around him expecting to get a nod in return. But fair-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed David Brunsma has no tolerance for “whiteness” because “white” to him is synonymous with privilege. He says he gets questions like, “What are the best neighborhoods in town, if you know what I mean …” His response: “No, I really don’t know what you mean.”

Half-Puerto Rican and half-Caucasian, Brunsma does not think of himself as biracial, but he does consider “Hispanic” to be a racial category…

…FOR THE MULTIRACIAL LABEL

Susan Graham and Project RACE

You can’t blame Ryan Graham for not wanting to check “other” on questionnaires requesting racial information. “It makes me feel like a freak or a space alien,” he testified during a U.S. House hearing on multiracial identification back in 1997, when he was 12 years old.

Ryan’s mother, Susan Graham, is the executive director of Project RACE, an advocacy organization for multiracial individuals. She, too, testified before the House on behalf of a separate multiracial category in census forms.

In her testimony, Graham berated the “all that apply” compromise announced by the Office of Management and Budget just days before the hearing.

“My children and millions of children like them merely become ‘check all that apply’ kids or ‘check more than one box’ children or ‘more than one race’ persons. They will be known as ‘multiple check offs’ or ‘half and halfers,’” she said…

Read the entire article here.