Mixed Race Studies

Every mixed race marriage is building a better Britain

The Independent
1999-03-04

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Lynchings, imprisonment and social exclusion will never stop individual s breaking racial barriers

WE HAVE looked, for a good many days, at the poisonous worms of racism as the Lawrence inquiry team turned over the soil. The coverage of this event has been unprecedented. Usually black issues have their small, insignificant place in the scheme of things. Suddenly what happened to one young black man became a statement of who we are as a nation.

The only other event that provoked similar levels of engagement was the Satanic Verses saga. The white elite has never tried harder to understand how racism, crude as well as subtle, violent as well as polite, is an abomination…

…But by far the biggest story is that this country has almost the highest rate of interracial relationships and number of young, mixed-race people anywhere in the Western world. More than half of British-born black men have a white partner, as do a third of Asian men. The rates for black and Asian women are rising. And prominent people in mixed marriages include Mr McDonald himself, Michael Caine, Lenny Henry and Dawn French, Baroness Scotland, Lord Taylor, Bernie Grant, Jemima Goldsmith, Salman Rushdie, Zeinab Badawi, Madhur Jaffrey, Sayeed Jaffrey, Jung Chang, Frank Bruno, Ainsley Harriot, Sharron Davies, Oona King, Hanif Kureishi, Sade…

…Read Titus Andronicus and you get the most modern debates on the identity of a mixed-race child. And in this country this has been going on since the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries fashionable rich ladies liked to have slaves as ornaments, and black lovers in their beds. One of these, Soubise from St Kitts, was adored by the Duchess of Queensberry and was the toast of fashionable London. Some of the earliest race riots in this country, at the start of the 20th century, were over the number of white women having sexual relationships with black men. In 1930 an official report said: “[Mixed race] families have a low standard of life, morally and economically. It is practically impossible for half-caste children to be absorbed into our industrial life.”

There will never be a speculative film made about what Queen Victoria really did with her handsome Indian servant Abdul Karim, but she did have his portrait painted; their letters were burnt by fusty officials after her death. In the Sixties, when free sex and false Indian gurus co-existed with rampant racism, mixed race relationships became the obsession of the media and others.

Last night I spent a glorious evening with Earl Cameron and Harry Baird, two black movie actors of that period. They talked about their roles in Sapphire, one of the first feature films about mixed-race relationships, and how “carefully” the intimacy between the two lovers had to be presented, and how nevertheless the audience left the cinema as if they had been at a funeral.

Well, it is not like that any more. Young mixed-race Britons are challenging all those who would rather they did not exist. They include the writer Jayne Ifekwunigwe, who has just written a marvellous book called Scattered Belongings, and stylish Chris Cleverly, the youngest barrister in this country with his own chambers, who cannot even understand my questions about the problems of being half-English and half African. His heritage has been, he says, one of his biggest assets…

Read the entire article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

Issues for Racially Diverse Families

A Research Project for the Capital Region Race Relations Association, Victoria [Canada]
2003
41 pages

Elias Cheboud (1959-2010), Adjunct Professor of Social Work
University of Victoria, Canada

Christine Downing, Project Coordinator
Multiracial Family Project

This report explores the experience of members of racially mixed families in Victoria, BC. Six themes were identified:(1. Identifying Self, 2. Being In Racially Mixed Family In Victoria, 3. The Challenges, 4. Access For Support, 5. Acceptance, 6. Gaps In Service And Resources). Then reference was made to the heuristic method, chosen to verify the process and to understand the meaning of these lived-experiences.

Most participants in this snapshot study have described encountering numerous barriers as part of a racially mixed family or as individuals living in Victoria. This could be due to everyday racism and discrimination that has closed their access to social services and resources. Interestingly, isolation, identity confusion and an impaired sense of belonging were common experiences reported by adults and children. As a result, for participants to seek resources and services, it has been difficult due to their uniqueness and inability to fit to the existing service and resource categories. The significance of this finding means participants are struggling to adapt their identity to fixed notions of identity (ie. “Chinese”, “Black”) in order to access services and/or seek resources.

What was fascinating in this study was that some individuals who chose to marry into different racial/ethnic backgrounds were rejected by their family of origin and as a result they became isolated from their community. Whereas some individual’s experiences regardless of racial/ethnic mix were positive, the family and community relationships remained solid. Based on this study, we conclude that racially mixed families in Victoria are lonely and the isolation experienced by their children is more serious due to the outright rejection of the community they live in.

The findings presented here are comparable to identity patterns explanations (individual, cultural, and social, as well as political issues) found in the literature. Furthermore, the extracted meanings have confirmed sources of identity as being congruent to the adopted theory of this research (explain briefly locational theory). This study is very important to all professionals as well as to human services agencies. Both human service agencies and professionals could refer to these participants’ patterns of experiences of reforming identities which serve as a guideline to help and provide services appropriately. We believe that we have exposed the need to facilitate this awareness and sensitivity to gain further knowledge about racially mixed people in Victoria. This research confirms commonly held assumptions about identity and associated stresses for racially mixed people. This research will serve to identify the various locations held by racially mixed people in the community as well as their unique needs which may ultimately help to bridge the gaps in knowledge about racially mixed families in Victoria.

The following recommendations are suggested to address these concerns:

1. Development of an educational, information and resource center in Victoria.
2. Development of support groups to address concerns brought up in the study
3. Province wide research (both qualitative and quantitative)
4. Extended training for professionals and service providers at all levels in community and government agencies.

Read the entire report here.

Patterns of Situational Identity Among Biracial and Multiracial College Students

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 23, Number 4 (Summer 2000)
pages 399–420
E-ISSN: 1090-7009, Print ISSN: 0162-5748
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2000.0019

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, the author explored the experience of 24 bi- and multiracial students at three postsecondary institutions. Five patterns of racial identification emerged, with peer culture and campus demographics as the major determinants of students’ identity. These findings, with insights into multiracial students’s experiences, can model how to explore other areas of socially constructed identity. It also introduces a conditional model for how students create new identity-based space on campus.

Despite significant and increasing numbers of biracial and multiracial students, almost nothing is known about their development and interactions in the college environment. This topic has special relevance to higher education at a time when multiraciality has become a matter of political and popular interest. A political movement of mixed-race people emerged in the last decade, demanding attention to mixed-race students in K-12 education and changes in data collection by racial group membership on the U.S. 2000 census (Schnaiberg, 1997; Yemma, 1997). For the first time, census respondents will be offered the option of selecting one or more racial categories (Baron, 1998; U.S. Office, 1997).

Prior to the October 1997 change in the census guidelines, studies showed that less than 2% of the population claimed to belong to more than one of the government’s existing racial categories (Schmidt, 1997). While this number is not very large compared to the general population, a change in how these individuals indicated their racial group categorization on the census could significantly influence racial group statistics used to enforce various civil rights laws (Baron, 1998). In the ongoing battle over access, equity, and affirmative action policy in higher education, racial statistics matter. At present there is no accurate count of multiracial students and no systems in place to deal with the new check-as-many-as-apply option.

This study does not attempt to develop such a system, but it begins to explore how multiracial students might see themselves in the context of higher education. While raising larger questions about the use of racial categories in higher education, this study focused on how campus peer culture influenced the ways in which multiracial students made meaning of their racial identity in college. Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, I explored how multiracial students’ interactions with peers, involvement in activities, and academic work influenced the kinds of identity-based spaces they chose to occupy and what caused them to create new, multiracial spaces on the monoracially defined campus landscape. Among 24 students at three institutions who identified themselves as biracial or multiracial, five patterns emerged in how students occupied existing identity-based spaces on campus or created new, multiracial spaces. The major determinants of students’ identity choices were campus racial demographics and peer culture. I developed a conditional model to explain the construction of public multiracial space on campus and ask how it might be applied in other situations.

The results of this study provide insight into the experience of multiracial students and can be used as a model to explore multiracial students’ lives at other institutions, as well as to explore other areas of socially constructed identity (gender, sexuality, class) on campus. The study builds on the multiracial identity development literature and fills a gap in college student development literature. It does not claim to represent the lives of all multiracial students, but it raises issues and questions that transcend institutional boundaries: How do students choose, create, and occupy public space on campus? How does peer culture mediate these choices? How might higher education address the needs of a growing population of multiracial people through programs, services, and policies?…

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The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.

Trans/formative identities: narrations of decolonization in mixed-race and transgender lives

University of Victoria
2007
114 pages

Sarah E. Hunt

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Interdisciplinary in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Department of Anthropology

This interdisciplinary research paper explores story and metaphor of “trans/formative identities” as a basis for challenging normative racial and gender categories. Autoethnography is used as a method for weaving the author’s own experience as a mixed-race Indigenous person with academic research and theory. The discussion is contextualized by an analysis of institutionalized colonial relationships framing Indigenous knowledge in academia and the role of Indian status in defining Indigenous identity. Six mixed-race and transgender or genderqueer people in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia are interviewed and the themes from their shared experiences are used as the basis for further understanding trans/formative identities. These themes are: irony; contradiction and impossibility; stories of home and family; naming and language; embodied negotiations, contextual selves, and; artistic visions.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• SECTION One: Introduction
• Section Two: Impacts of colonial deconstruction of indigenous knowledge and emerging indigenous research methods
  • Indigenous knowledge in academia: historical and personal contexts
  • Methodological approaches to thesis research
  • Situating myself as an Indigenous researcher
  • Working in my own community contexts
  • Morality and narrative: collaboration and dialogue
  • Film as a tool of representation
  • Alto ethnography and identity in relation
• Section Three: Representations of indigenous identity and emerging discussions of trans/formative subjectivities
  • Assigned identities and their representations
  • Empowering subjects: emerging discussions of racial and gender identities
  • Trans/formative representations of the symbolic domain
• Section four: themes of trans/formative identities
  • Understanding metaphor: themes and stories
  • Thematic exploration of interview dialogue
• NOTES ABOUT THE VIDEO
• REFLECTING BACK: LESSONS LEARNED AND LINGERING QUESTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX B: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

Read the entire thesis here.

Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States

Social Forces
Volume 21, Number 4 (May 1946)
pages 438-477
DOI: 10.2307/2572217

William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
Library of Congress

Prefactory Statement

In many of the eastern States of this country there are small pockets of peoples who arc scattered here and there in different counties and who are complex mixtures in varying degrees of white, Indian, and Negro blood. These small local groups seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps or inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth. Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or islands and peninsulas have protected them and kept alive a portion of the aboriginal blood which greeted the first white settlers on these shores. Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or the Alleghenies. A few of these groups arc to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

No satisfactory name has ever been invented to designate as a whole these mixed outcasts from both the white and Negro castes of America. However, their existence can be traced back practically to the beginning of settlement by whites in the various areas in which they occur. The early white settlers called these racial intermediates “free colored” or “free negroes” and considered them frequently as mere squatters rather than as legitimate settlers on the land. The laws were interpreted to the disadvantage of these folk and they were forbidden to testify in court. Acts were passed to prohibit their immigration from other States and they were considered as undesirables since they bridged the racial gap between free whites and slave Negroes.

After the Civil War these mixed folk were still classified as “colored” or as “mulattoes” but they were frequently encouraged to develop their own institutions and schools separate from the Negroes. In recent years there are some indications that the numbers of these intermediate mixed populations are growing rather rapidly and that they may total well over 50,000 persons at the present time.

There is little evidence for the supposition that they are being absorbed to any great extent into either the white or the Negro groups. Their native breeding grounds furnish a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of population which periodically swarms into cities and industrial areas. The characteristics of illiteracy, poverty, and large families mark them as members of the more backward section of the American nation. Draft boards and the armed forces have found it difficult to classify them racially for military service. As a sizable native minority they certainly deserve more attention than the meager investigations which sociologists and anthropologists have hitherto made of their problems. A recognition of their existence by social scientists can hardly prejudice their social prospects since the vast majority can not possibly hope to pass as “white” under the present social system. In the hope of enlisting the interest of scientific bodies and foundations in research on these mixed groups, then, the following brief memorandum outline of ten of these mixed “racial islands” is presented…

[The list described in the memorandum are:]

1. Brass Ankles and Allied Groups of South Carolina
2. Cajans and Creoles of Alabama and Mississippi
3. Croatans of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia
4. Guineas of West Virginia and Maryland
5. Issues of Virginia
6. Jackson Whites of New Jersey and New York
7. Melungeons of the Southern Appalachians
8. Moors and Nanticokes of Delaware and New Jersey
9. Red Bones of Louisiana
10. Wesorts of Southern Maryland

Read or purchase the article here.

Brass Ankles Speak

Essays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
circa 1929

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

Prefatory Note by Gloria T. Hull

Entitled “Brass Ankles Speaks” (Vol. 2, WADN), it is an outspoken denunciation of darker skinned black people’s prejudice against light-skinned blacks told by a “brass ankles,” a black person “white enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.” This brass ankles recalls her “miserable” childhood in “a far Southern city” where other schoolchildren taunted and plagued her because she was a “light nigger, with straight hair!” This kind of rebuff and persecution continued into a Northern college and her first teaching job:

Small wonder, then, that the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked or not. But when we began going about together and spending time in each other’s society, a howl went up. We were organizing a “blue vein” society. We were mistresses of white men. We were Lesbians. We hated black folk and plotted against them. As a matter of fact, we had no other recourse but to cling together.

And she states further that “To complain would be only to bring upon themselves another storm of abuse and fury.”

This essay was as close as Dunbar-Nelson ever got to revealing feelings about her own racial status as a “yaller nigger.” She tried to publish it, but would not or could not do so under her own name, and the magazine editor refused to print it pseudonymously.

Brass Ankles Speaks (circa 1929)

The “Race” question is paramount. A cloud of books, articles and pronunciamentos on the subject of the white man or girl who “passes” over to the other side of the racial fence, and either entirely forsakes his or her own race, to live in terror or misery all their days, or else come crawling back to do uplift work among their own people, hovers on the literary horizon. On the other hand, there is an increasing interest and sentimentality concerning the poor, pitiful black girl, whose life is a torment among her own people, because of their “blue vein” proclivities. It seems but fair and just now for some of the neglected light-skinned colored people, who have not “passed” to rise and speak a word in self-defense.

I am of the latter class, what E. C. Adams in “Nigger to Nigger” immortalizes in the poem, “Brass Ankles.” White enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.

My earliest recollections are miserable ones. I was born in a far Southern city, where complexion did, in a manner of speaking, determine one’s social status. However, the family being poor, I was sent to the public school. It was a heterogeneous mass of children which greeted my frightened eyes on that fateful morning in September, when I timidly took my place in the first grade. There were not enough seats for all the squirming mass of little ones, so the harassed young, teacher—I have reason to believe now that this was her first school—put me on the platform at her feet. I was so little and scared and homesick that it made no impression on me at the time. But at the luncheon hour I was assailed with shouts of derision—“Yah! Teacher’s pet! Yah! Just cause she’s yaller!” Thus at once was I initiated into the class of the disgraced, which has haunted and tormented my whole life— “Light nigger, with straight hair!”

This was the beginning of what was for nearly six years a life of terror, horror and torment. For in this monster public school, which daily disgorged about 2,500 children, there were all shades and tints and degrees of complexions from velvet black to blonde white. And the line of demarcation was rigidly drawn—not by the fairer children, but by the darker ones. I had no color sense. In my family we never spoke of it. Indian browns and cafe au laits, were mingled with pale bronze and blonde yellows all in one group of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. For so peculiarly does the Mendelian law work in mixed bloods, that four children of two parents may show four different degrees of mixture, brown, yellow, tan, blonde.

In the school, therefore, I felt at first the same freedom concerning color. So I essayed friendship with Esther. Esther was velvet dark, with great liquid eyes. She could sing, knew lots of forbidden lore, and brought lovely cakes for luncheon. Therefore I loved Esther, and would have been an intimate friend of hers. But she repulsed me with ribald laughter—“Half white nigger! Go on wid ya kind!”, and drew up a solid phalanx of little dark girls, who thumbed noses at me and chased me away from their ring game on the school playground…

Read the entire essay here.

The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Volume 1)

Oxford University Press
1988
480 pages
4-5/8 x 6-1/2
Hardback ISBN13: 978-0-19-505250-3; ISBN10: 0-19-505250-1

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

Edited by Gloria Hull

Spanning the gamut of literary genres, from autobiographical short stories to poetry, journalism, and novelettes, this is a comprehensive collection of one of America’s most seminal women writers. A testament to the nineteenth century as birthplace for black woman writers, The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson offers insight into the themes of oppression and intolarance, often considered dangerous or ignored in the nineteenth century, but now pervade much writing today. Themes such as crossing racial boundaries, infused with Dunbar-Nelson’s autobiographical fervor.

Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted

1893
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Project Gutenberg EBook
2004-05-14
#12352

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

Read the entire book here.