Mixed Race Studies

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Engendering of a Post-Reconstruction Multiracial Politics

The Conversation
Number 2 (2009-2010)

Kirin Wachter-Grene

Once a promising fiction writer and would-be spokesman for African-Americans, Charles W. Chesnutt promoted a form of multiracialism but is largely forgotten today. Kirin Wachter-Grene traces the development of Chesnutt’s ideas about the amalgamation of races and their afterlife in the 21st century.

Introduction: The Roots of Multiracialism

Multiracialism, as the movement, academic field, and media discourse has come to be known, is a politics that is both controversial and particularly apropos to our contemporary moment in which terms like “post-racial” are frequently used in public discourse in reference to the era of President Obama and to the cultural climate in general.  Multiracialism should not be confused with multiculturalism. Where multiculturalism generally promotes the acceptance of divergent people and cultures for the sake of diversity, multiracialism maintains a decidedly conservative agenda of colorblind ideology that strives to blur the color line at the expense of racialized (particularly black) politics, culture, and identity. (I say particularly black because, as critics have long argued, blackness is one of the most, if not the most explicitly, racialized identities in the United States).  The driving force behind multiracialism is not a celebration of racial and ethnic diversity, but rather a disappearing of this diversity and a supposed de-emphasis of race.  Despite its idealized intentions, what multiracialism tends to achieve is a re-emphasis of rigid racial classifications by subsequently “othering” those who cannot “transcend” race.  The politics of multiracialism can only apply to the people who are privileged enough to be seen as, or who see themselves as, “race neutral” or crossover figures, or as racially ambiguous.  It does little to affect the lived realities of those whom society still continues to stereotype and demonize on a daily basis as a result of their explicit racialization, or identifiable racial identity. Furthermore it disregards and de-legitimizes people who choose to identify with, and take pride in their race or ethnicity, whatever that means to them.

Conceptions of a multiracial politics, a “mestizo” (“mixed”) America (as it is called in such politics), or a post-racial, “colorblind” culture is not an idea endemic to the late 20th century, although cultural critics, like Jared Sexton, have recently suggested it to be so.  In his new book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Sexton locates his argument concerning multiracialism within the last thirty years, referring to it as a “decidedly post-civil rights era phenomenon,” (p. 1, italics author’s own).  This is partly because Sexton bases his argument on the careful consideration of the rhetoric of contemporary multiracialists, such as Charles Byrd, the founding editor of Interracial Voice, and writers Randall Kennedy, Gregory Stephens, and Stephen Talty to name a few.  While it is true that multiracialism as a politics has benefited greatly from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in that a space was created for this kind of cultural discourse, the anxieties inherent to it are much older, and can readily be traced to some of the literature produced during an inchoate period in the history of the United States­­—the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This literature, in which themes of multiracialism, “miscegenation” (i.e. an antiquated and offensive term for interracial reproduction), and calls for a homogenous national identity are explicit, reveals nothing if not the socio-political debates and struggles for subjectivity that continue to obsess our culture today.

One of the most understudied and provocative American authors of the era, Charles W. Chesnutt, was publishing essays and fiction from 1881 to 1931.  This was a time in which the country was struggling to articulate its burgeoning identity in everything from politics and imperialism to concepts of sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.  The Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years in particular seemed to be consumed with an existential crisis as to what the nation was and who its citizens were, and a palpable fear that the unification of the country could once again disintegrate without rigid social and political classifications.  Chesnutt’s work in particular provides an excellent example with which to think about the developing ideas of race, subjectivity, community, and nationality, because his work, perhaps more so than any other author’s work at the time, is rather strange, controversial, and challenging.

Chesnutt was a man of mixed race and white enough to “pass,” but he chose to identify himself as black and affiliate himself with the problem of race prejudice. While Chesnutt was a “civil rights activist, literary artist, student of social history, educator, business man, and cultural savant,” (Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches. p. xxxvi), he was also a multiracialist, and his politics were not always, if at all, articulated in the best interest of the advancement of the black community for the sake of itself. Most notably, several of his essays do not shy away from advocating total racial amalgamation as the solution to the “Negro Problem,”—he argues for “miscegenation” to be enacted to the point of racial obliteration, an idea echoed by contemporary multiracialists. While Chesnutt advocated these ideas blatantly in several of his speeches and essays, he had a difficult time constructing a cohesive rhetoric, demonstrated by his struggles to rationalize his politics within his fiction. In other words, while his explicit amalgamation essays boldly take one tone, his fiction is much more ambiguous as he experimented with different “solutions” to race antagonism. His curious literature combined with the historical moment at which he was publishing, make for rich material with which to think about both Chesnutt’s particular authorial anxieties and the tensions inherent in these issues as they relate to our current politics…

Read the entire essay here.

The Cuneys: A Southern Family in White and Black

Texas Tech University
August 2000
289 pages

Douglas Hales, Professor of History
Temple College, Temple, Texas

A Dissertation in History Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial FulfiUment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

[Note from Steven F. Riley: See the book based on the dissertation titled, A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas.]

The study begins with Philip Cuney. He had much in common with other paternalistic slaveholders of the South. He believed in the institution of slavery and had grown accustomed to the lifestyle that the peculiar institution afforded him. By Texas standards, his large tracts of land and his large number of slaves made him a wealthy man. He became a respected and prominent leader in Austin County. Cuney also went into Texas politics and gained some success both before and after Texas became a state. Cuney, like many Southern planters, used his powerful position as a slaveholder to begin a sexual relationship with one of his female slaves. His relationship with his slave Adeline Stuart produced eight slave children. Along with his white wife and children, Cuney in effect had two families, one white and one black.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER
• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. PHILIP CUNEY: POLITICIAN AND SLAVEHOLDER
• III. NORRIS WRIGHT CUNEY: LABOR AND CIVIC LEADER
• IV. POLITICAL EDUCATION, 1869-1883
• V. NEW LEADER OF THE PARTY
• VI. PARTY AND PATRONAGE
• VII. MAUD CUNEY: EDUCATION AND MARRIAGE
• VIII. MAUD CUNEY-HARE: MUSICIAN, DIRECTOR, WRITER
• IX. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…[Norris Wright] Cuney, as an urban black, seemed far removed from the mass of nineteenth-century black Texans who lived in rural areas pursuing agricultural endeavors in impoverished conditions. In many ways, Cuney represented a new urban black middle class. As a mulatto he represented a minority within a minority. Cuney strongly identified himself as a “Negro.” Many men of mixed heritage within the first generation of black leadership following the Civil War became a black elite both culturally and politically. As the son of an upper-class white man and a mulatto slave, Cuney represented an even more select group of blacks who received an education and freedom from their white fathers. According to Joel Williamson, “It was almost as if mixing of this special sort in late slavery had produced a new breed, preset to move into the vanguard of their people when freedom came.”

White southerners, steeped in the ideology of slavery and black inferiority, and feelings of guilt over miscegenation, refused to see a difference between mulattoes and darker skinned blacks. Most Southern states codified this view into law. Some Antebellum mulattoes, especially house servants and others in close contact with their white fathers, often viewed themselves as distinct from other blacks; but following the Civil War, their interests fused with those of the black community. When freedmen entered the political arena they shared common enemies and objectives that made this fusion permanent. Dark-skinned blacks viewed this relationship as positive. According to Williamson, “they needed verbal and mathematical literacy, economic, political, and social education, and people to teach their teachers.” The mulatto elite along with Northern missionaries provided that help.”…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Ethnic Identity of Biethnic Mexican American/European Americans Raised in Texas

Texas Tech University
May 2005
73 pages

Kristal L. Menchaca

A Thesis in Human Development and Family Studies Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

The primary purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of Mexican American/European American biethnic individuals raised in Texas. The present study looked at the applicability of Poston’s (1990) five-stage model of biracial identity development to the experiences of 8 Mexican American/European Americans.

Results indicated that Poston’s (1990) model was applicable to this cohort. The respondents gave responses indicating progression through the five stages of Personal Identity, Choice of Group Categorization, Enmeshment/Denial, Appreciation and Integration. These responses were narrations of current involvement or memories of childhood experiences. Also, Poston’s (1990) suggestion that biracial individuals experience confusion and maladjustment because of their ethnicity was also applicable to the biethnic individuals in this study.

Other themes that influenced identity development of the respondents and also considered salient to their experiences were family experiences and what it means to be Mexican American and European American, separately. Respondents were aware of family’s experiences with discrimination. There was an overall positive meaning assigned to being Mexican American and European American, however, it was not as strong for the latter.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER
  • I. INTRODUCTION
    • Statement of the Problem
  • II. LITERATURE REVIEW
    • Mexican Americans in Texas
    • Definition of Terms
    • Identity Development
    • Model of Biracial Identity Development
    • Biracial Identity Development
    • Purpose of Current Study
  • III. METHODS
    • Qualitative Research
    • Phenomenology
    • Participants
    • Measures
    • Ethnicity Survey
    • Autobiographical Interview Probe
    • Procedures
  • IV. RESULTS
    • Data Analysis
    • Personal Identity
    • Choice of Group Categorization
    • Enmeshment/Denial
    • Appreciation
    • Integration
    • Confusion/Maladjustment
    • Family Experiences
    • What it Means to be Mexican American
    • What it Means to be European American
  • V. DISCUSSION
    • Personal Identity
    • Choice of Group Categorization
    • Enmeshment/Denial
    • Appreciation
    • Integration
    • Confusion/Maladjustment
    • Family Experiences
    • What it Means to be Mexican American
    • What it Means to be European American
    • Conclusions
    • Strengths of Study
    • Limitations of Study
    • Recommendations for future research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • A. TABLE ONE
  • B. EMAILS FOR RECRUITMENT
  • C. CONSENT FORM
  • D. ETHNICITY SURVEY
  • E. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTERVIEW PROBE

Read the entire thesis here.

The Anti-Miscegenation History of the American Southwest, 1837 To 1970: Transforming Racial Ideology into Law

Cultural Dynamics
Volume 20, Number 3 (November 2008)
pages 279-318
DOI: 10.1177/0921374008096312

Martha Menchaca, Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin

This article proposes that a historical analysis of court cases and state statutes can be used to illustrate how racist ideologies were transformed into practice and used to legalize racism. To exemplify this argument, marriage prohibition laws in the United States Southwest from 1837 to 1970 are examined.  This analysis demonstrates that African Americans and Anglo Americans were not the only groups affected by anti-miscegenation legislation.  Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans were also profoundly affected and their respective histories contribute to a more indepth understanding of the policies and practices used by state governments and the courts to discriminate against people of color.  This article also reveals that most legal cases reaching state supreme courts in the Southwest involved Mexican Americans because their mixed racial heritage placed them in a legally ambiguous position.

…Afromestizos and the First Anti-Miscegenation Law in the American Southwest

The history of anti-miscegenation law in the American Southwest began after Texas obtained independence from Mexico in 1836. One year later, on 5 June 1837, the newly formed Republic became the first nation in the Southwest to prohibit people of different races from marrying freely (Marital Rights, art. 4670, 2466, in Paschal, 1878: 783). People of European blood and their descendants were prohibited from marrying Africans and their descendants. A racially mixed person could marry a White person if they had no African ancestors in the last three generations. If the law was broken, the White person was sentenced to two to five years in prison. Texan congressmen justified imprisonment by the seriousness of ‘the offense against public morals, decency, and chastity’ (Tex. Penal Code 386, in Paschal, 1878: 429).

Texas’s anti-miscegenation codes were part of the Republic’s larger body of racially discriminatory laws passed after independence. In 1836, Mexico’s liberal racial legislation was rescinded. Citizenship was no longer extended to all people and Mexico’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1829 was nullified. Only Anglo Americans and Mexicans who were not of African heritage were given citizenship (Cx. of the Repu. of Tex. 1836, art. 6, s. 6, in Laws of Tex., vol. 2, p. 1079). Slavery was also reinstated and freed Blacks who had been emancipated under Mexican law were returned to bondage…

Read or purchase the article here.

Hapa Japan Conference

Center for Japanese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies
University of California, Berkeley
2011-04-08 through 2011-04-09

• Introduction
• Agenda
• Registration
• Tickets: New Vision Award Recipient Jero, A Conversation & Mini-Concert

Introduction

Hapa is a Hawaiian term that is now widely used to describe someone of mixed racial or ethnic heritage. A New York Times article cites that just within the United States, one in seven marriages are now between people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

The Center for Japanese Studies, along with the Hapa Japan Database Project and All Nippon Airways, will host the Hapa Japan Conference on April 8th and 9th, featuring specialists in the study of mixed-race Japanese history, identity, and representation. Topics range from the history of mixed-race Japanese in the 1500s, part-Japanese communities in Australia, to the exploration of identity and representation through story-telling, films, and a photo-exhibit. For more information, please reference the conference agenda or contact cjs-events@berkeley.edu.

Enka Superstar Jero: A Conversation and Mini-Concert

University of California, Berkeley
Wheeler Hall
2011-04-08, 20:00-21:15 PDT (Local Time)

Free and open to the public

The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is proud to announce that Jero, the Japanese-African-American enka singer, has been selected as the winner of the 2nd annual Berkeley Japan New Vision Award. The Center will host an invitation-only award ceremony at 5:00pm on Friday, April 8, at the Doe Library Morrison Room on the UC Berkeley campus followed by a public on-stage interview and mini-concert at 8:00pm in Wheeler Hall.

Part Japanese and part African American, Jero (born Jerome Charles White) is enka’s rising star ever since his hit single Umiyuki burst onto the charts in 2008. His albums, Yakusoku (2009), Covers (2008), Covers 2 (2009), and Covers 3 (2010) have been widely acclaimed as he has revived interest in this music genre. Winner of the 2008 Best New Artist Award at the Japan Record Awards and the 2011 Berkeley Japan New Vision Award, he has also regularly appeared on Japanese TV and commercials as well as performing at the prestigious New Year’s Eve Kôhaku Utagassen concert twice.

The Berkeley Japan New Vision Award was established in 2009 to award an individual who has, in recent times, dramatically transformed our vision of Japan. Singing traditional Japanese ballads in an American idiom, not only has Jero rekindled an interest in enka among the younger generation of Japanese but he has also opened up the possibilities for fluent Japanese-speakers from around the world breaking into the entertainment and other industries in Japan. Given his mixed-race background, he has also become a symbol for the acceptance of a more multiethnic society for 21st-century Japan…

For more information, click here.

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Review: Pascoe]

Journal of Social History
Volume 25, Number 1 (Autumn, 1991)
pages 174-176

Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010), Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. By Paul R. Spickard (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. xii plus 532 pp.).

Intermarriage must surely rank as one of the most neglected topics in American social history. Only a handful of historians have attempted to study it, some of  whom focused on the enactment of laws that prohihited interracial marriages while others traced changes in the social patterns of intermarriage over time. Whichever route they chose, historians relied heavily on the statistical data and theoretical constructs put forth by social scientists. This alliance between historians and social scientists, a sort of intermarriage of its own, has been something of a love-hate relationship: dependent on social scientists for both data and theories, historians tend to use their insight into change over time to challenge the very theories they borrow.

The most recent—and surely the most ambitious—historical study of intermarriage in the United States, Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America, is a case in point. Spickard focuses on intermarriage in three different ethnic groups over the entire twentieth century. The unprecedented range of his study puts him in an ideal position to criticize social science theories, which, he argues, are flawed because they concentrate too much on social structure and not enough on culture. In an attempt to redress the balance, he adds the “cultural factors” of “a group’s own perception of its relative social status, the general society’s toleration of intergroup relationships, and different ethnic groups images of each other” to the analysis (pp. 343—44). Mixing data from statistical studies with cultural images from oral history interviews, popular journals, and movies, Spickard tests the validity of a wide range of social science theories about intermarriage and ethnic identity.

Mixed Blood is organized into four separate sections, one each on Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, and Black Americans, and an additional one on Japanese women who married American soldiers. Within each section, Spickard considers a melange of topics. The most innovative are those Spickard considers “cultural” topics, including the “images” mainstream and ethnic groups held of each other, the “hierarchy of preference” each group showed in choosing marriage partners, and (a particularly useful choice) the interethnic divisions usually invisible to dominant groups. The rest are topics far more familiar, including such old chestnuts as the “success” of intermarriages and the ethnic identity of the children. On several issues Spickards determination to explore the attitudes of ethnic groups as well as those of the dominant society pays off impressively. He demonstrates, for example, that some ethnic groups, like Japanese Americans, held their own notions of racial superiority so strongly that they were even less likely than Anglo Americans to welcome the children of intermarriages into their communities. On others, his findings are too narrow to be of much help. In trying to measure the “success” of intermarriages, for example, Spickard compares the divorce rate of intermarriages with the divorce rate of marriages within each ethnic group; curiously, he never compares them with the divorce rate in American society as a whole.

In the end, only two theories about intermarriage survive Spickard’s scrutiny: the general proposition that the extent of intermarriage has increased over the twentieth century and the assertion that the larger the ethnic community is, the lower the rate of intermarriage will be. Several others, including the theory that an unbalanced sex ratio leads to intermarriage, that intermarriages fall into a “triple melting pot” pattern, and that barriers of race are harder to breach than barriers of religion or national origin, fail to survive because they cannot account for all of the widely disparate groups Spickard has chosen for his study. Still others, including nearly every theory about gender and class in intermarriage, fail for more fundamental reasons. Theories about ethnic identity fare no better: Spickard discards the notion that children of mixed marriages invariably fit into subordinate groups, raises doubts about whether intermarriage is a reliable indicator of assimilation, and finds tremendous variation in the extent to which intcrmarriers maintain ethnic ties and ethnic identity.

Well-documentcd as they are, these results should scarcely come as a surprise, for historians have plenty of reason to be suspicious of social scientists’ transhistorical explanations for social patterns. More surprising is the extent to which Spickard’s critique of social science theories itself remains embedded in transhistorical categories. Spickard is adept at using his comparative data to disprove the theories of social scientists. Yet, like the social scientists he ultimately rejects, Spickard takes for granted that two of the fundamental axes of intermarriage—race and gender—are fixed, immutable categories, the “givens” of historical analysis. As a result, he overlooks the possibility that his data point not only to comparative variability in ethnic identity but also to significant historical reformulations of the notions of race and gender. To take one striking example: because Spickard discovered that there were more similarities between the intermarriage patterns of Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans than between those of Japanese Americans and Black Americans, he concludes that perhaps, race is not so fundamental a category of social relationships in America as has often been supposed” (p. 343). The more reasonable point, 1 suspect, is that over the time period which Spickard covers, there were significant shifts in the social construction of the idea of race, shifts that might help make interpretive sense of Spickard’s own finding that over the course of the century, Japanese Americans, once labeled by dominant Americans as “Black,” later came to be considered “White” (p. 347). Scholars interested in these questions should consult anthropologist Virginia Dominguez’s White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana, a recent social science study of intermarriage that pays unusually close attention to the social construction of race/ A similar attempt to map shifts in the social construction of gender would seem to be in order as well, for as Spickards critiques of existing theories show, gender is perhaps the least understood aspect of interracial marriage.

In the future, more attention to the social construction of race and gender may lead studies of intermarriage in a different direction. For the moment, though, one thing is certain: for its sheer ambition, for its unsurpassed range of data, for its painstaking critiques of social scientific theories, Mixed Blood is indispensable reading for historians interested in the study of intermarriage.

White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Rutgers University Press
May 1986
325 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2088-9

Virginia Dominguez, Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: The Legal Domain
  • 2. Defining the Racial Structure
  • 3. The Properties of Blood
• Part II: The Political Economy of Labeling
  • 4. Shaping a Creole Identity
  • 5. Racial Polarization
  • 6. Anatomy of the Creole Controversy
• Part III: Manipulating the Practice and the Practice of Manipulating
  • 7. The Criterion of Ancestry
  • 8. The Logic of Deduction
  • 9. Conclusion
• Appendix: Mayors of New Orleans and Governors of Louisiana
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

The tension between individual choice and social norm emerges as something of a false dichotomy, and might better be represented as a continued negotiation by actors of how to interpret the norms. … It allows us to see rules not merely as a set of constraints upon people, but as something that people actively manipulate to express a sense of their own position in the social world.

—Michael Herzfeld in American Ethnologist, 1982

A recent Louisiana case attracted widespread national attention. In the fall of 1982 Susie Phipps, age forty-eight, went to court to have herself declared white. The headline in the International Herald Tribune read: “Woman Challenges a Race Law: Look at Me, I’m White’; Despite Fair Skin, She is Labeled ‘Colored’ under Louisiana Statute Based on Genealogy” (October 5, 1982).’ In the December 3 People magazine, the headline read: “Raised White, a Louisiana Belle Challenges Race Records That Call Her “Colored.”‘ Even in a small North Carolina paper, the Durham Morning Herald, there was the story and the eye-catching headline: “Woman Files Suit, Says She Is White” (September 15, 1982).

The details of Susie Phipps s life arc noteworthy, but so is the form in which the “facts” were presented to the public. In each of the headlines quoted above, the papers hinted that there may be more than one basis for racial identification. The International Herald Tribune juxtaposed physical appearance to genealogy. People magazine found a contradiction in being raised white and being called colored. The Durham paper suggested a lack of agreement between self-identification and identification by others.

Recognition of the inexactitude of race continued in the body of each article. All report the State Bureau of Vital Statistics’ claim that she is legally colored because her great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Negress and a number of other an cestors mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. They note, in addition, that the bureau rested its case on a 1970 Louisiana statute that made 1/32 “Negro blood” the dividing line between white and black. To put it in perspective, they informed the public that Louisiana law traditionally held that any trace of Negro ancestry was the basis for legal blackness.

Both People and the Tribune cited in some detail the expert testimony that anthropologist Munro Edmonson presented in court on Mrs. Phipps’s behalf. According to the Tribune, he testified that there is no such thing as a pure race, no way to determine what percentage of Negro blood Mrs. Phipps’s slave ancestor had and, thus, no way to determine what percentage black Susie Phipps is. In addition, the paper claimed Edmonson called the present law “nonsense” in an interview he granted outside the courtroom. According to People, he testified that the genealogy the bureau prepared to support its case was “impressive, [but that] it says nothing at all about Mrs. Phipps’ race.” He is quoted as saying that genes are “shuffled” before birth, making it at least theoretically possible for a child to inherit all his genes from just two grandparents. Then, as if to appeal to the public at large, the magazine went on to summarize parts of Edmonson’s testimony that, it said, might “elicit a barrage of vigorous objections”: that modern genetic studies show that blacks in the United States average 25 percent white genes and that whites average 5 percent black genes, and that by these statistics, using the 1/32 law, the entire native-born population of Louisiana would be considered black!

In the wording of these stories, there was a shade of cynicism or disbelief—insinuations that the concept of race contained in the 1970 statute and employed by the Bureau of Vital Statistics was out of date, unscientific, and yet encoded in the law. There were insinuations that this was an issue resurrected from the plaintiff’s zeal, after all, was matched by the bureau’s perseverance—and this in a country where for about a generation there had been official racial equality under the law. The Tribune reported that her story, ‘a story as old as the country, has elements of anthropology and sociology special to this region, and its message, here in 1982 America, is that it is still far better to be white than black.” It went on to say that the 1970 Louisiana statute in question “is the only one in the country that gives any equation for determining a person’s race.” “Elsewhere,” it continued, “race is simply a matter of what the parents tell the authorities to record on the birth certificate, with no questions asked.” The thrust of the argument was the same in the piece in People magazine: “Birth certificates in most states record race for purposes of identification, census, and public health. Most states, and the U.S. States Census Bureau, now follow a self-identification policy in registering race at birth. In Louisiana, however, a 1970 statute still on the books has snared Susie and thousands of others into racial classifications determined by- fractions. … In Susie’s case, . . . the state contended that other ancestors were mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons—outmoded/expressions denoting mixed blood (December 3, 1982, pp. 135-136; emphasis added). Months later, the New York Times reiterated the theme when it announced the repeal of the 1970 statute late in June 1983. It quoted the New Orleans state representative who wrote the law that replaces the 1970 statute, saying that the state legislature was moved to act “to reflect modern thinking” (June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41; emphasis added).

It is clear throughout the media coverage that the case hinges on competing and coexisting perceptions of the nature of racial identity: the possibility of purity, the arbitrariness of calculations, the nature of reproduction, and the mutability of the criteria of identity. But in and of themselves, thesedisputed points are not novel. After three decades of active struggle for equal civil rights, continued advances in human genetics that make talk of “blood” seem primitive or folklorish, and the publication of both scholarly manuscripts and popular books proclaiming the sociocultural basis of our concepts of race, a localized argument about one woman’s racial identity hardly seems newsworthy.

The twist, so to speak, in this case is not racial identity per se, but rather the role of law. Louisiana was singled out by the press because it had a statute with an “operative equation for the determination of race” (New York Times. June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41), not because it is the only state in which there are varied, often competing bases for racial identification. The issue became one of constitutionality. Did the 1970 statute infringe on the rights granted citizens by the United States Constitution? Is one of those rights the freedom to choose what one is?

The appealing question is also a nagging one. There is, to begin with, the semblance of a contradiction. To speak of “what one is” is to imply that some identities are fixed, given, unalterable. A change of phrasing makes this clearer. “Freedom to choose what one wants to be” would contain an implicit denial of the fixedness of identity in that it suggests that it might be possible to realize one’s wishes. “Freedom to choose what one is becoming” would convey a similar message. In this case, will and desire seem irrelevant, and extra-individual forces are patently evident in the very phrase “is becoming’; but the words openly assert a process of becoming. The activity would be continuous rather than completed. In both of these alternative forms, there is room for individual choice and action and, thus, room for conceptualizing freedom to choose one’s identity. But how, after all, can we possibly conceive of freedom of choice if we take identities as givens^ And if there is really no choice, how are we to interpret the legal granting of “choice”?

The United States Supreme Court has taken a pragmatic approach to this question in recent years. In 1944 (Korematsu v. United States. 323 U.S. 214)” and again in 1954 (Boiling v. Sharps. 347 U.S. 497), the Court argued that racial classifications must be subject to strict judicial scrutiny because they deny equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. And in 1964 (McLaughlin v. Florida. 379 U.S. 184; Anderson v. Martin, 375 U.S. 399), it held that racial classification is “constitutionally suspect.” But in several more recent cases (cf. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 [1969]; Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 [ 1963]; Bates v. The Cityof Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516 [ i960]), the Court has sustained statutes that define racial categories when it has deemed such statutes necessary for the purpose of realizing compelling and constitutionally acceptable state interests (cf. Davis 1976: 199-200).

Clearly the civil rights movement of the 1960s increased sensitivity to the existence of prejudice and led to the identification of invidious discrimination. But the issue then was the granting of rights to blacks, not the granting of the right to be white or black. The former had compelling state interest but carried ironic implications. Protecting the rights of blacks required the maintenance of a system for distinguishing blacks from whites, even though the system had come into existence for the purpose of disenfranchising those identified as black.

To redress a legal injustice, then, the Court permits racial classification by institutions. The question is whether the Courts pragmatic concern of protecting the rights of a sector of the population that has historically been subjected to systematic discrimination infringes on the rights of individuals to opt not to be racially classified and to identify themselves racially according to their own criteria of classification…

The Author Speaks: Interview With Daniel J. Sharfstein

AARP Bulletin
American Association of Retired Persons
2011-02-17

Julia M. Klein

His powerful new book examines how three American families became white

Before Daniel J. Sharfstein’s senior year at Harvard, he spent the summer of 1993 in South Africa as a volunteer for a voter education project. There, one of his fellow workers told him she had been categorized as “colored,” or mixed-race, because a constable doing the classification appreciated her father’s service as a police officer.

“As a result of that one simple act, she had led a very different life from her colleagues,” recalls Sharfstein, now associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “That was a revelation to me, that something that could seem as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of a personal relationship or community ties or even just individual whim.”

He returned to the United States wondering whether the same kind of thing had happened here.

Sharfstein’s South African experience, followed by a stint as a journalist, Yale Law School and years of archival research and interviews, led to The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. The book interweaves the story of three families with African ancestry—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—who, over time and in different ways, became identified as white. The color line in America, Sharfstein learned, has been surprisingly permeable. The AARP Bulletin talked to Sharfstein by phone.

Q. Throughout American history, how important was physical appearance in defining whiteness?

A. To a certain degree it was important. We have to remember that, for a long time, the United States was a rural society and almost everybody worked outside. There was a really broad range of complexions that could be considered white…

…Q. What was the legal standard for defining whiteness in the 19th century?

A. There really was no standard. Virginia for more than a century had a one-quarter rule. If you had one African American grandparent, that made someone legally black. Other states, like North Carolina, had a one-eighth rule, while South Carolina didn’t have any specific fraction. One South Carolina court held in the 1830s that “a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.”…

…Q. In slavery’s absence, you write, “preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant aggressive action to enforce them.” Why?

A. What really mattered in the South, in the antebellum period, was not who was black and who was white, but who was slave and who was free. The prospect of freedom for African Americans was a motivating force getting people to think about what racial categories themselves meant. In the last days of slavery, because slavery as an institution was under such attack, white Southerners were countering with race-based justifications, and that survived the demise of slavery. After the Civil War, as black freedom was taking root, right alongside it were modern forms of racism that persist to this day.

Q. You suggest that rigid rules about race only increased the number of people transitioning from black to white. Why was that?

A. When rules became more rigid, they were almost always accompanied by rules that subjected African Americans to higher taxes, made it harder for them to own land and increased fear that free African Americans would be returned to slavery. The harder these laws made it to live and to provide for their children, the greater the incentives were to make the move from black to white. Because these lines were being drawn in a way that essentially separated people who looked white from [other] people who looked white, it was impossible to make the line between black and white impregnable…

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