Mixed Race Studies

Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work In the Arts, Ahumanities and Social Theories
Number 31 (2000)
98 paragraphs

Stephanie Athey, Associate Professor of English
Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts

Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells

 This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism—black and white—in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the base of feminist work.

A central tenet of twentieth-century feminisms, the concept of female sovereignty–women’s economic, political, sexual and reproductive autonomy–was first defined, debated and justified through eugenic and imperialist discourse at the turn of the last century. Black and white feminist discourse of the period made the politically enfranchised, legally protected body both the goal and token of full citizenship. However, within the frameworks white women elaborated, the economic, political, sexual, and reproductive autonomy of black and white women were set fundamentally at odds.

… Even when the organized societies of the American eugenics movement came to focus exclusively on “better breeding” as the only lasting means of race improvement, many black and white women’s organizations retained euthenic projects of regenerative reform well into the twentieth century, promoting the eugenic benefits of social hygiene, temperance reform, training in domestic science, and the like. The eugenic interests of both Frances Willard and Victoria Woodhull, for instance, combine race-driven reproductive agendas with other regenerative environmental reforms.

Black men and club women shared these interests as well. African American artists and intellectuals promoted black race purity as a means of conserving “our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals.” In the face of white racial theories, these race conservationists promoted the positive value of blackness. Black nationalists like DuBois, T. Thomas Fortune, Alexander Crummell, stressed different dangers related to race mixing, ranging from loss of black culture and consciousness to a biological “loss of vitality” or “vitiation of race characteristics and tendencies.” Other prominent African Americans supported a eugenics of race mixing or “amalgamation” as a means of genetic improvement. Proponents like Charles Chesnutt or Pauline Hopkins imagined a new American line that blended the strengths of a multiracial heritage but ultimately “conform[ed] closely to the white type.” All these groups reinforced color-based distinctions, and like white eugenists, these African Americans also measured racial fitness in terms of bourgeois class and gender conventions.

Kevin Gaines has argued that though the elite male voice of race conservation publicly defended elite black women against accusations of unchastity, they also frequently reinforced white racist slander, presuming lower-class and rural women’s complicity in systemic sexual abuse. Certainly, racist and sexist theories of black female degeneracy were powerfully resisted by black women’s groups. Yet white supremacist hereditarian and nativist premises were absorbed by black women’s organizations as well. For instance, leaders of the African American, Boston-based Women’s Era Club fought against lynching and racial segregation while maintaining elitist and nativist positions on working class culture and “foreigners,” and an attendant interest in “social hygiene.” As black women refashioned the white codes of bourgeois womanhood into black feminist resistance, their “politics of respectability” was fused to a civilizationist uplift ideology; this for some made it compatible with eugenic discourses of degeneracy. For instance, Nannie Burroughs weighs euthenic against eugenic strategies in her discussion of black poverty in Washington. While the “student of euthenics,” she says, “believes that the shortest cut to health is by creating a clean environment… to do a work that will abide we must first “get the alley’ out of the seventeen thousand Negroes.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (2011)
Article 16
27 pages

Carole Lynn Stewart, Assistant Professor of English
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

And when the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutionaries, that shall have ended in that victory.

—Abraham Lincoln, “An Address Delivered before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society”

In the mid‐nineteenth century, temperance movements throughout Britain and the United States strove for universalist and international goals of individual sovereignty, restraint, and enlightened freedom. As with many international movements of civil societies emerging from the formation of modern states, they expressed themselves in strongly nationalistic forms of identity. American temperance movements often assumed many of the middle‐class, domestic, and individualistic values associated with the Protestant work ethic and its inner‐worldly asceticism. Temperance in general became prominent in the United States in the period that corresponded with the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, though examples of temperance organizations predate this surge of social movements in the revivalistic atmosphere. American temperance movements were simultaneously concerned with defining the purity of self and establishing a coherent national identity. The notion and practice of temperance has also been a salient orientation of many religions; however, in the colonial period, not even the New England Puritans were temperance activists. On the one hand, the birth of American temperance seemed to initially appear as a result of the nationalist revolutionary ethos, expressing the desire for widespread civil societies: “temperate” behavior suggested a type of rational, restrained, and public character. On the other hand, temperance movements acquired an evangelical character in the context of the affected and enthusiastic social spaces of “awakening.”

The opening epigraph from Abraham Lincoln captures the contiguity between concepts of slavery and intemperance, as well as the exceptionalist ethos prominent in the United States and brought to bear on issues of individual freedom of the “land.” Indeed, many temperance groups were nativist and virulently racist even when temperance was linked to antislavery. Notably, beyond popular goals of moderation, total abstinence, and prohibition, temperance also expressed different promises and civil ideals for many African American abolitionists who conjoined temperance and antislavery. For the former enslaved, temperance seemed to promote and encompass national values like the Protestant work ethic, self‐reliance, and individual restraint, particularly for the poor and those who were striving for social elevation by inculcating the values of the middle class…

…The word “civilization” does not grow out of American democracy and its revolutionary founding, but rather from modern European imperialism and its emerging structures of civil society. The word is particularly Eurocentric and was not in frequent use until the eighteenth century, first in France and then in England. Historian of religions Charles H. Long observed in his paper “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem” that “the meaning of this term cannot be understood apart from the geographies and cultures of the New World that are both ‘other’ and empirical.” While an empirical other—recognized negatively as an enslaved person—Brown consistently wrote of such figures as the “tragic mulatta” and the predicament of one‐drop racism in the United States, with positive views of the eventual “amalgamation” of the “races.” Moreover, discussions of Brown’s work commonly allude to the self‐consciously constructed aspects of his identity—from the lack of a fixed identity, his biracial, nearly outwardly “white” identity that made it possible to almost pass, to Brown’s multiple roles in actual life and his writing. These roles begin with his name William as a child on the plantation being changed to Sandford because another white child had the same name, and his eventual renaming as William Wells Brown. The name was “bestowed upon” him from the Quaker, Wells Brown, who helped him escape. From that fluid and uncertain position, he assumed various vocational and activist roles as a steamboat operator, a barber, a banker, a husband and father, a gentleman among the ladies, a radical abolitionist and republican revolutionary, an anglophile, a temperance activist, a consummate man of letters, a historian, a playwright, a novelist, and, in the 1870s, a medical doctor of uncertain qualifications.

This intermixture of roles and identities also disrupted the familiar binary of primitive/civilized. Brown conceived of the inherently Eurocentric concept of civilization in creolized ways—living an intermixture that opposed the opposition of terms. Indeed, rather than necessarily leading to the situation of the empirical other, what some have understood as Brown’s liminal “trickster” identity could be viewed as a restrained orientation characterizing a basic revolutionary structure out of which Brown saw a modern civilization emerging. This notion of civilization not only came to fruition through Brown’s European travels (1849–1854) and direct reflections on the harbingers of “civilization,” but through his postbellum reflections on African civilizations and his pilgrimage for “home” to establish a dignified relation to the land in My Southern Home (1880). In Brown’s travels, temperance remained the locus for a new, creolized civilization, expressing a manner and style of behavior that resembles a sociogenetic and psychogenetic meaning of restraint forged in light of the history of transatlantic slavery and an imagined revolutionary founding, as well as countering the excesses inherent in modern “civilized” exchanged…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire

Oxford University Press
May 2011
320 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199604159; ISBN10: 0199604150

Damon Ieremia Salesa, Associate Professor of History, American Culture, and Asian/Pacific Islander Studies
University of Michigan

The Victorians were fascinated with intersections between different races. Whether in sexual or domestic partnerships, in interracial children, racially diverse communities or societies, these ‘racial crossings’ were a lasting Victorian concern. But in an era of imperial expansion, when slavery was abolished, colonial wars were fought, and Britain itself was reformed, these concerns were more than academic. In both the British empire and imperial Britain, racial crossings shaped what people thought about race, the future, the past, and the conduct and possibilities of empire. Victorian fears of miscegenation and degeneration are well known; this study turns to apparently opposite ideas where racial crossing was seen as a means of improvement, a way of creating new societies, or a mode for furthering the rule of law and the kingdom of Heaven.

Salesa explores how and why the preoccupation with racial crossings came to be so important, so varied, and so widely shared through the writings and experiences of a raft of participants: from Victorian politicians and writers, to philanthropists and scientists, to those at the razor’s edge of empire—from soldiers, missionaries, and settlers, to ‘natives’, ‘half-castes’ and other colonized people. Anchored in the striking history of colonial New Zealand, where the colonial policy of ‘racial amalgamation’ sought to incorporate and intermarry settlers and New Zealand Maori, Racial Crossings examines colonial encounters, working closely with indigenous ideas and experiences, to put Victorian racial practice and thought into sharp, critical, relief.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Crossing Races
• 1. Systematic Colonisation and Racial Amalgamation
• 2. Intimate Encounters in New Zealand Before 1840
• 3. Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand 1840-1850s
• 4. Crossing Races, Encountering Places
• 5. The Tender Way in Race War
• Conclusion: Dwelling in Unity
• Bibliography

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 8, Issue 1 – Bahamian Literature (2011-04-22)
Article 14

Daphne Grace

Keith A. Russell, Adjunct Professor
The College of The Bahamas, Northern Campus

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell, Freeport, Grand Bahama (27 August 2008)

DG: You have written several short stories and three published novels that are full of social realism, brutality, violence, and the harsh realities of life. Is that a sense of anger coming out?

KR: Well, I think you are certainly correct that there is brutality in the novels and a great amount of social realism, there’s no question about it. Whether or not the anger is something in the author himself, I’m not sure; maybe it’s unconscious if it’s coming across. But I’m sure the language and the tone sometimes could be interpreted as anger. It’s more me trying to be very forceful and clear about some of the situations of life and those we encounter. Even if I think I’m writing a love story, love doesn’t happen in a vacuum, sometimes love situations can be brutal. So I guess anger is something that comes out of that type of brutality.

DG: I’d like to come back to your ideas about love later. But based on what you have just said, do you see yourself as part of the tradition of social protest in the works of Caribbean writers?

KR: There is a sense of that; although I see myself not so much as a writer engaged in social protest. Rather, I see myself as a writer engaged with social accuracy, and as a writer engaged with trying to provide an alternative vision of what the world could be like. If that is protest, then I am very much in the line of writers who are writing protest, as I am looking at our society from a particular angle and asking questions. How did we get here and how do we move from this place? Is this the best we can do? This is a slice of life, this is our experience. Can we do better?…

…DG: In your earlier novels, in J.D. Sinclair especially, much of the tension and many of the problems arise from the colonial past and the lingering aftermath of colonization. Do you see yourself also as a postcolonial writer in terms of dealing with this past?

KR: In a sense. Postcolonialism is an interesting term, especially for those of us who live in these colonial aftermaths, so to speak. Whether or not postcolonialism is a reality is another matter, and I don’t know how we get beyond the colonial idea. Especially for us living in The Bahamas, and our relationship with Britain, it is to extricate ourselves from that to say that we are ‘post-colonial’ in any sense. The British are no longer here ruling on land, but our encounter with them is deeply engrained and we are also British. We are British and Bahamians and also Africans, however that hybrid comes together. So we cannot extricate ourselves from being British and become postcolonial, because it is engrained in our psyche that we are also British—and that encounter with the British has sometimes been harsh.

DG: And how does that inform or impact your novels?

KR: To date in my novels, I have been writing more or less about the harsh encounter and the aftermath of that, but the encounter has not always been harsh. Even in my moments when I am quite clear in depicting the harshness of the encounter, I hope that there is no bitterness in that regard. It is just a matter of: this is who we are, we have encountered the British and this is how  it has affected us, and this is what it has done to our abilities, and so on. But beyond that, how do we accept our British selves? How do we recognize both the good and the bad, but yet move on from that without having to dismantle our British identity, but also carry that with us in a positive way and appreciate the good encounter of it?

DG: You mention hybridity and the concept of asking are we British, are we African, or some hybrid mix. In Hezekiah’s Independence (where both the father and the son are given the same name) the younger of the Hezekiah’s is half white, and is called a ‘pale nigger’ at one point. Is it intentional that the protagonist of the novel is a result of the colonial encounter?

KR: Yes, very much so.

DG: And in this case, that encounter has disastrous consequences for the white woman, his mother.

KR: I think they are a forward looking couple, in that they are able to rise above that whole conflict between the British and African Bahamians, and the distinction of “are we British, are we African?”—and find love. And even that is fraught with all sorts of dangers, because even though they have moved on, their society hasn’t moved on yet. The society isn’t ready to see this as something legitimate that ought to happen in the world. So the whole concept of colour that happens in our society, that long spectrum of colours we have, is beyond that black/white issue, because in the long journey of our encounter with Britain we have produced individuals of all shades of skin. So how do we determine who is black and who is white in this mix? Really? In our society, very often the more pale your skin the more privileges you have, so how do we reconcile this problem? How do we deal with the long spectrum of colour that has come out of this union, this encounter, of the Europeans and the Africans? And that mix is the exploration that is going on here. So I think the younger of the Hezekiah’s is wrestling with the notion of ‘how and where do I fit in?’

DG: And for many people, this is really one of the key questions of the new millennium.

KR: In America there is the long tradition of the tragic mulatto, this individual who doesn’t fit in anywhere. She doesn’t fit in with the traditionally white folks, or the traditionally black folks. Here is a lost individual sitting in limbo someplace trying to find her identity; and finding out that identity involves not only working out how do I accept my black self, but how do I accept my white self also. This is part of Hezekiah’s dilemma: how do I come to a sense of myself? By endorsing, legitimizing, accepting all of who I am, both my father’s side and my mother’s side. So how do we as Bahamians come to a place where we accept both our African heritage and our European heritage? How do we put that all together and find a whole sense of self?

DG: I think that’s true of anyone who is not just racially mixed but culturally mixed in any way, as the whole concept of identity and belongingness takes on a new dimension. Also, with the massive migrancy today, it’s also the situation that dislocated or diasporic peoples feel they no longer have a place in either world: they don’t fit in anymore in the homeland and they don’t feel at home in the new place either. It’s a sense of what’s been called living in “nowhere-ville”. So I think it’s larger than just a color question.

KR: That’s right…

Read the entire interview here.

Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre

PopMatters
2011-04-08

Matt Mazur, PopMatters Contributing Editor

Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing—a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)…

Read the entire article here.

INDIGO – Laura Kina & Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 North Miami Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
2011-05-14 through 2011-06-30

Opening Reception
2011-05-14, 14:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

In the 19th century, Bengal was the world’s biggest producer of indigo but today, the deep blue color of indigo is synthetically created in a lab and is associated in the West with blue jeans more than its torrid colonial past. But indigo holds a sustained presence in the post-colonial identity of India. Employing fair trade embroidery artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Jyoti and Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges. The artists decided to collaborate in 2008-2009, considering their mutual interest in textile history, pattern & decoration. They began by thinking about the intersections of their own ethnic and national positions in relation to fabrics. For this exhibition in particular, Jyoti’s Indigo Narratives utilize traditional embroidery and embellishments along with heritage symbols belonging to traveling ethnic communities who settled in coastal Gujarat while Kina’s Devon Avenue Sampler series focuses on a contemporary Desi/Jewish community in Chicago.  This exhibition includes new works in mediums such as hand-embroidery on khadi, acrylic on fabric, hand-stenciled Sanskrit calligraphy and textile embroidery on canvas.

For more information, click here.

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012: Call for Papers

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
2012-11-01 throuth 2012-11-04
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Click here for this announcement in PDF format.

Conference Description: What is Critical Mixed Race Studies? will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 1-4, 2012. The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

Proposals:We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

To submit a proposal or for more information, please visit: http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

Deadline for all proposals: December 15th, 2011.
Selections will be finalized by March 1, 2012.

All queries should be directed to cmrs@depaul.edu.

Group provides space for ‘racial Hybrids’

The University News
A Student Voice of Saint Louis University Since 1921
2011-04-14

Sean Worley

Black Student Alliance, Filipino Student Association, Indian Student Association and the list of groups oriented around race goes on. Although these student groups have a noticeable presence on campus, for some students, they just are not enough.
 
“I constantly feel different,” freshman Rebecca Glasgow said. “I relate to things but I always feel different.”
 
Glasgow identifies as an Arab-American with her father being from the United States and her mother from Syria, she often wonders where her chartered student organization is on campus.
 
Hybrid Identities is such a student organization for students who identify with no one particular race. In other words they are mixed race, or hybrid.
 
This CSO is currently in its probationary status but is already starting to gain interest and support…

Read the entire article here.

Stories of Biracial America

The New York Times
2011-05-06

Polly Rosenwaike

Barack Obama makes two appearances in Danzy Senna’s first story collection, “You Are Free”: in a photograph on an administrator’s desk at an exclusive preschool, and on the bumper sticker of a BMW. Seeing that BMW, the narrator of the story “Replacement Theory” observes, “The election had come and gone, the blackish man was in charge, and the slogan on the bumper—Yes We Can—already had the feeling of some dusty, long-gone revolution.”

If Obama is “blackish,” Senna’s central characters are usually whitish, the genes of a light-skinned parent predominating over those of the dark-skinned one. Langston Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too” begins: “I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother.” In Senna’s stories, as in her novels (“Caucasia” and “Symptomatic”) and her memoir (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”), she explores what it’s like to be the lighter sister…

Read the entire review here.

You Are Free: Stories

Riverhead (and Imprint of Penguin Press)
2011-05-03
240 pages
ISBN 9781594485077

Danzy Senna

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they’d applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.