Mixed Race Studies

Op-Ed: President Obama and the Mixed Race Mix-up

Digital Journal
2009-03-22

Hargrove Jones

Today, a young woman in a California audience, stood up and told President Obama that she is mixed-race, and glad that the president is someone she can relate to. Does that mean she cannot relate to her father, or her mother?
 
As a matter of fact, if her parents shared her point of view, she would not exist.

Confused thinking, like a person with a black parent and a white parent, purporting to need a mixed race person, in order to relate; echos the chaotic ideas of Alice Walker’s bi-racial daughter, claiming her mother is jealous because she has a rich white father. As if she cannot conceive of the truth, which is, that it is her mother who is rich; and it is her mother who picked that white man, to be her father. This type of mis-perceiving can only occur, when you deny who you are…

…Mixed race, without white parent involvement, has been part and parcel of the Diasporan community for 400 years, which is why those who are a part of this new social experience, and who want to be identified as mixed race or bi-racial, have difficulty distinguishing themselves physically since, large numbers of Diasporans, who are pleased to own their African heritage, look more European than most bi-racial people.

People who are of African descent, but who want to excuse themselves from that designation, are plagued by social concepts like the one drop rule. According to the one drop rule, one drop of African blood makes one African. But it is more than a biological description, it speaks to the historic attitude toward Africans since, the concept is not reciprocal. One drop of European blood, does not a European make. Inferentially, the rule speaks to a racial measure that is qualitative, not quantitative…

…Most mixed race people, like all people of African descent, wear a symbol in their flesh, that has the same effect as the star of David appended to the Jews during the holocaust. It identifies us with slanderous misrepresentations, and as people who are available for abuse.

In my opinion, the mixed race claim is an effort at exception from a maligned group, and the aggressive inclusion of President Obama, is an attempt to dignify it. Only people of African descent are perpetually saying, that they are something, besides the obvious.

Acknowledgment of racial and ethnic heritage is fine and right, but it should be responsive to a question, or in a meaningful context, not an anxious announcement that begs to escape the many painful experiences that racism provides.

Mixed race claimants should be aware, that whatever you call yourself in America, if you look like you are of African descent, you will be treated like you are of African descent. But it’s everyone’s right to be called whatever suits them, and the woman in the audience, obviously wants to be called mixed race, but President Barack Obama is, a self-described African American. She should have given him, the same respect, that she wants for herself.

To read the opinion piece, click here.

Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing

University of Southern California
May 2009
348 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION)

This dissertation develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche. In Chapter One I introduce the rhetorical, cultural, and conceptual significances of passing based on a review of the literature. I introduce the central argument of the project by proposing a theory of (bi)racial passing that considers the problems and possibilities of mixed race representation and mobility as a bridge between Platonic episteme and Sophistic doxa as well as between the material and symbolic components of biracial categorization. Chapter Two considers the historical narrative of Ellen Craft at the intersection of synecdoche and irony to highlight and transgress real and imagined borders that stretch beyond a simple consideration of race. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed critique of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, my third chapter considers passing as an antecedent form of identity theft and as a form of resistance. In contrast to the cases examined in these chapters, my fourth chapter explores Harper’s Iola Leroy, as a fictional account of passing that ties synecdoche to eloquence, articulating the tension between the threat of passing contained in the Plessy ruling and its relation to contemporary attempts at measuring discrimination at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

My fifth chapter takes a turn by exploring the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain, as contemporary narratives of passing based on tragedy and synecdoche in the context of minstrel performance and Jim and Jane Crow segregation. My last chapter fleshes out the theory introduced in the first, working toward a theory of (bi)racial passing that rethinks inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. Then, blending the critical race theory of intersectionality with rhetorical personae I explain the significances of synecdoche, metonymy, irony, appropriation, eloquence, and tragedy in the various instances of passing explored. At a theoretical level, I rethink the inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. I conclude with a rhetorical theory of passing based on the fourth persona and six original passwords that present opportunities for future research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Running Along the Color Line: Racial Passing and the Problem of Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter One References
• Chapter Two: The “Craft” of Passing: Rhetorical Irony, Intersectionality and the Case of Ellen Craft
• Chapter Two References
• Chapter Three: “Membership Has Its Privileges:” Plessy’s Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft
• Chapter Three References
• Chapter Four: “She Was Above All Sincere:” (Bi)racial Passing and Rhetorical Eloquence in Iola Leroy
• Chapter Four References
• Chapter Five: “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:” Reading The Human Stain and Racial Passing from Text to Film
• Chapter Five References
• Chapter Six: Things Said in Passing: Toward a Rhetorical: Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing
• Chapter Six References
• Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr
• Figure 2: “The New Eve”
• Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing
• Figure 4: Ellen Craft in Plain Clothes
• Figure 5: Ellen Craft as Mr. Johnson
• Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes
• Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy
• Figure 8: Hopkins as Elder Silk
• Figure 9: Miller as Younger Silk
• Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of Passing
• Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional
• Figure 12: Layers of Meaning: The Dramatic and Tropological Roots of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 13: Neoclassical Elements of Passing
• Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black or White?

The New York Times
2011-05-14

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white—they were planters…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Tales of the struggles, successes of the racially mixed [Book Review]

The Boston Globe
2011-05-21

Jan Stuart

In the final offering of Danzy Senna’s new short story collection, “You Are Free,’’ a racially mixed woman sits in a bustling LA fast-food joint over a plate of macaroni and cheese, counting the mixed-race couples enjoying their Sunday lunch.

A refined radar for other folks of multicolored heritage has bound Senna’s characters since her debut novel, “Caucasia,’’ in which a light-skinned black teenager named Birdie has a white Jewish identity foisted upon her by her white mother, who is on the run from a violent radical past. Birdie ultimately reclaims her blackness, along with her estranged black family, at the end of a bruising odyssey. “I had become someone I didn’t like,’’ she confesses. “Someone who had no voice or color or conviction.”

Senna established her voice and convictions forcefully with “Caucasia,’’ but the peace of mind intimated by her heroine’s hard-won closure has proven to be illusory. The predominantly mixed-race protagonists of “You Are Free’’ continue to wallow in the societal pressures and inner tumult wrought by their ambiguous skin color and racially fused DNA. And their turmoil is palpable. A couple’s polyracial family tree is “cultural chaos.’’ A character’s indeterminate features are perceived as “a confusion of races.’’ Interracial couples are self-mockingly pegged as “that mewling and defensive group.”…

Read the entire review here.