Mixed Race Studies

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

University of California Press
November 2003
332 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520240704

David R. Roediger, Babcock Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

David R. Roediger’s powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a “still white” nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book—Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani—insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context. Roediger illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. He shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that “nonwhite” alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo.

Colored White reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race—especially its links to social and economic inequality. This landmark work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible—though far from inevitable—that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Roediger’s clear, lively prose and his extraordinary command of the literature make this one of the most original and generative contributions to the study of race and ethnicity in the United States in many decades.

Table of Contents

• One: Still White
  • 1. All about Eve, Critical White Studies, and Getting Over Whiteness
  • 2. Smear Campaign: Giuliani, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the Critical Study of Whiteness
  • 3. White Looks and Limbaugh’s Laugh
  • 4. White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action
  • 5. “Hertz, Don’t It?” White “Colorblindness” and the Mark(et)ings of O.J. Simpson (with Leola Johnson)
• Two: Toward Nonwhite Histories
  • 6. Nonwhite Radicalism: Du Bois, John Brown, and Black Resistance
  • 7. White Slavery, Abolition, and Coalition: Languages of Race, Class, and Gender
  • 8. The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790–1860
  • 9. Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the “New-Immigrant” Working Class (with James Barrett)
  • 10. Plotting against Eurocentrism: The 1929 Surrealist Map of the World
• Three: The Past/Presence of Nonwhiteness
  • 11. What If Labor Were Not White and Male?
  • 12. Mumia Time or Sweeney Time?
  • 13. In Conclusion: Elvis, Wiggers, and Crossing Over to Nonwhiteness
• Notes
• Credits
• Index

The Hudson River School via Cincinnati

Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit
Kingston, New York
2011-05-28

Sparrow

“History can be blind,” observes Joseph D. Ketner II, curator of “Robert S. Duncanson: ‘the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons,’” an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill. Duncanson (1821-1872) was an African-American landscape painter, once highly regarded, now almost entirely forgotten.
 
Born a freedman in Seneca County, New York, Robert Duncanson moved as a youth to Michigan. At the age of 16 he apprenticed to a house painter, then briefly began his own painting and glazing business. In 1840, Duncanson resolved to become an artist, relocating to Cincinnati, the largest city in “the West.” The youth taught himself to paint by copying Thomas Cole paintings and sketching from life. He became an itinerant portraitist, then moved on to nature scenes.
 
By the 1850s in Cincinnati, the two most popular art forms, landscape painting and daguerreotype photography, were dominated by African-American artists. James P. Ball was the preeminent daguerreotypist, Duncanson the top painter. Both men were light-skinned “mulattos,” of mixed race, benefiting from the racial caste system of the time. Cincinnati was a northern city, in a “free state” (one without slavery) whose economy and social outlook were Southern. “Cincinnati was one of the most vociferous abolitionist cities, behind Boston, and it was also one of the most adamant pro-slavery cities, simultaneously—a very, very complex dynamic,” explains Ketner.

In 1855, Duncanson and Ball painted a 600-yard antislavery panorama entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.” This work consisted of a canvas wrapped around two large dowels, which would be unspooled in an auditorium to the accompaniment of an orchestra, with lighting effects and a narrator describing the changing scenes. The “Mammoth Pictorial Tour” traveled the country, advertised as “Painted by Negroes.” Sadly, it is no longer extant…

…It is tempting to interpret Duncanson’s landscapes politically. Those dreamy temples on the shores of rivers—are they images of a utopian world without slavery and racism? Or does that oversimplify them? Duncanson himself once told his son, on the issue of race, “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s Mixed Heritage: A Mother’s Perspective

Beacon Broadside
2008-02-14

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology
City University of New York

It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought?

I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, sitting around the morning meeting at her politically progressive Quaker school, they were talking about how there’d never been a woman president, or a Black president, or a Jewish president. Victoria   piped up: “I could do it; I could be the first of all of them!” Now that she’s older, I think a presidential career is pretty well out for Victoria—the first multi-pierced, Mohawk-wearing, tattooed, electric-bass player president? Probably not. But back when she was in kindergarten, I’d have thought the chances of someone with Obama’s family background becoming president were unimaginably slim.

In case you’ve not seen a news report this year: Obama had an African father and a white American mother—from Kansas, no less, though ultimately her son was raised mostly in Hawaii. Too bad that his mother isn’t here to see this; she died, too young, of ovarian cancer. She did live long enough to see him in the Senate, miracle enough that was! If she was here now, I wonder how she’d be responding to the inevitable media attention: people are blogging about why we’re calling him “Black” rather than “mixed race,”about his “white heritage,”wondering if he is “Black enough,” thinking about his thoroughly unusual and so thoroughly American story…

…The “mixed race” community—powered to a significant (embarrassing?) extent by white mothers of kids who are not white—seeks a unique “mixed” identity, and Obama could be a poster child. But I don’t think we need poster children for mixed identity: we need a world in which a Black man can be president, no matter who his mother is. In such a world, “mixed” wouldn’t matter politically—we could still have our cultural identities, as many as we want, actually, us Americans with our occasional Cherokee grandmother, French great grandfather, Italian immigrant great, great grandmother, and maybe a couple of Jews and the occasional Black ancestor. Celebrating ethnicity can be fun. But race in America is not about fun or celebration: it’s about power. In the world we’ve got, it’s the Black ancestor that sets the identity, because that’s still the racial fault line in America…

Read the entire article here.