Mixed Race Studies

The Discourse of Interracial and Multicultural Identity in 19th and 20th Century American Literature

Indiana University of Pennsylvania
May 2007
373 pages
AAT 3257969

Dale M. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

The narratives of and about mixed-race people have provided a varied and rich artistic canvas. Using various literary works as tools for investigation, this project explores a discourse for mixed-race people and determines to what extent that discourse shapes conceptions about them. In addition, it examines to what extent subjects of mixed-racial heritage and identity establish and form new cultures, struggle for the validity of their existence in spite of racial binaries, affirm their experiences and to some degree question the validity of race itself. A discourse of mixed-race subjects is related to a discourse about race. Issues of hybridity, creolization and mestizaje have affected postcolonial subjects and Americans throughout the Diaspora. The project will consider people of mixed Native American, African, Latin, Asian, European descent and others. Literature involving and about mixed-raced subjects is their history—whether fiction or nonfiction—a history that has been silenced by political, economic and racial ideology. Mixed-racial and mixed-cultural subjects exist in the “between” spaces of racial binaries. They are “called into place” by self and others through discourse to define and negotiate power. Among the writers and works used are: Gigantic, by Marc Nesbitt, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, “Désirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin, “Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “After Many Days,” by Fannie Barrier Williams, Passing by Nella Larsen, “The Downward Path To Wisdom” by Katherine Anne Porter, “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor, Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith, “Origami” by Susan K. Ito, and poetry by Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman and others.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• One: THE DISCOURSE OF MIXED-RACE SUBJECTIVITY AND IDENTITY
  • Introduction
• Two: MIXED-RACE DISCOURSE IN “DESIREE’S BABY” BY KATE CHOPIN, “STONES OF THE VILLAGE” BY ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON, AND ‘AFTER MANY DAYS: A CHRISTMAS STORY” BY FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS
  • Introduction
  • “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin
  • “Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
  • “After Many Days: A Christmas Story” by Fannie Barrier Williams
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Two
• Three: MIXED RACE AND DISCOURSE IN THE WORK OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, NELLA LARSEN AND FLANNERY O’CONNOR
  • Introduction
  • “The Downward Path To Wisdom” by K.A. Porter
  • “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor
  • Passing by Nella Larsen
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Three
• Four: YELLOWMAN, THE HUMAN STAIN, GIGANTIC AND THE DISCOURSE OF INTERRACIAL AND INTRARACIAL SUBJECTIVITY
  • Introduction
  • Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith
  • The Human Stain by Philip Roth
  • Gigantic: “The Ones Who May Kill You In The Morning” by Marc Nesbitt
  • Closing Remarks For Chapter Four
• Five: THE FUTURE AND THE DISCOURSE OF MIXED-RACE SUBJECTIVITY
  • Conclusion
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix A – Permissions Letter Professor Natasha Trethewey
  • Appendix B – Permissions Letter Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The New York Public Library

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker

The Virginian-Pilot
2004-08-18

Warren Fiske

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood.

There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name “Plecker.”

Soon, only Hearl’s immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

“I thought Plecker was a devil,” she says. “Still do.”

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide…

…From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

“It never seems to end with this guy,” said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.”..

…Plecker’s first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator – a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp – that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns…

…Plecker saw everything in black and white. There were no other races. There was no such thing as a Virginia Indian. The tribes, he said, had become a “mongrel” mixture of black and American Indian blood.

Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. He was convinced that mulatto offspring would slowly seep into the white race. “Like rats when you’re not watching,” they “have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.

He called them “the breach in the dike.” They had to be stopped.

Many who came into Plecker’s cross hairs were acting with pure intentions. They registered as white or Indian because that’s how their parents identified themselves. Plecker seemed to delight in informing them they were “colored,” citing genealogical records dating back to the early 1800s that he said his office possessed. His tone was cold and final.

In one letter, Plecker informed a Pennsylvania woman that the Virginia man about to become her son-in-law had black blood. “You have to set the thing straight now and we hope your daughter can see the seriousness of the whole matter and dismiss this young man without any more ado,” he wrote.

In another missive, he rejected a Lynchburg woman’s claim that her newborn was white. The father, he told her in a letter, had traces of “negro” blood.

“This is to inform you that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white,” he wrote.

“You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

“It is a horrible thing.”…

…Plecker’s racial records were largely ignored after 1959, when his handpicked successor retired. Virginia schools were fully integrated in 1963 and, four years later, the state’s ban on interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional. In 1975, the General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.

Health Disparities in the Context of Mixed Race: Challenging the Ideology of Race

Advances in Nursing Science
Volume 28 Number 3 (July/September 2005)
Pages 203-211

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, RN, Associate Professor of Nursing
University of Washington, Tacoma

Debates are occurring about the relative contribution of genetic versus social factors to racial health disparities. An ideology of race is manifested in genetic arguments for the etiology of racial health disparities. There is also growing attention to people of mixed race since the 2000 US Census enabled them to be counted. Consideration of the complex issues raised by the existence of people of mixed race may bring clarity to the debates about racial health disparities, offer a challenge to the ideology of race, and afford important insights for the practice of research involving race.

Read or purchase the article here.

White Supremacists from 1920s Still Thwarting Virginia Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2011-04-26

Tanya Lee

Congress is once again considering legislation that would grant federal recognition to six of Virginia’s 11 state-recognized American Indian tribes—the Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes and the Monacan Indian Nation. Chief Gene Adkins of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe said, “We have been working on federal recognition for about 10 years. It is hard for me to understand why it has not gone through like we hoped.”

Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran, sponsor of the House bill that would recognize the tribes, said he introduced the legislation to correct a “travesty of justice. The Virginia Indian tribes have been treated as unjustly as any tribe in the country, and that’s saying a lot. These are the tribes that helped the first English settlers in North America survive. Of all the tribes, they should have been recognized.”

There are three routes to federal recognition—administrative, judicial and legislative, explained Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “The administrative route is very expensive. It’s a long process. Tribes gather documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reviews them and tells tribes what other documents they need, then it’s get in line behind all the other tribes seeking recognition. It could take 30 years and cost $1 million per tribe. Most tribes going for recognition just don’t have that kind of money.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, said Wayne Adkins, is another big reason why going through the BIA process would be difficult for the Virginia tribes. “When Native Americans were given the right to vote [in 1924], Virginia adopted racially hostile laws,” Moran explained. The laws targeted blacks—and, by a quirk of logic—American Indians. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of the most restrictive in the nation, but it was not the only one—30 states passed similar legislation.

Plecker, registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, was instrumental in crafting that state’s law. He argued that there were no full-blooded Indians left in the state by the early 20th century; therefore, all who claimed Indian heritage were part something else, and he decided the best thing to do would be to lump them in with blacks, since, by his mandate as registrar, a person could claim only one of two racial backgrounds in Virginia: Caucasian or “Negro.” People claiming to be Indians, Plecker said, were r­eally blacks trying to move their families into a position where they could “pass,” or claim to be Caucasian.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 outlawed miscegenation, and its intent, quite simply, was to keep Anglo-Saxon blood pure. Wrote Plecker: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.… The [terms] ‘Mixed,’ ‘Issue,’ and perhaps one or two others, will be understood to mean a mixture of white and black r­aces, with the white predominating. That is the class that should be reported with the greatest care, as many of these are on the borderline, and constitute the real danger of race intermixture.”…

…Though Social Darwinism and eugenics originated in England, their real champions at the beginning of the 20th century were Americans. Plecker was a zealous eugenicist, advocating both a­nti-miscegenation laws and sterilization of the “unfit,” while also proselytizing that Caucasians and non-Caucasians should be kept separated. As part of his work in the Virginia Statistics Office, he eradicated records of Indian births and marriages in order to support his directive that all Indians were to be categorized as blacks. These are the very records that Virginia’s Indian tribes now need in order to receive federal recognition. Other records of tribal significance were destroyed in fires….

Read the entire article here.

Dances With Aliens?

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dr. Dawkins shares her thoughts on multiracialism, media and James Cameron’s blockbuster film “Avatar” at the 2011 American Studies Association Conference.

There are Italians with black skin

Africa News
2010-05-28

Stephen Ogongo

Interview with Sabrina Jacobucci, President of Association of Afro-Italian Children

To be black and Italian at the same time is a new reality the Italian society is still struggling to accept.  Adoption and increase in the number of mixed marriages between Italians and Africans are gradually leading to an increase in the number of Black Italian children, the so-called Afro-Italians.  But the Italian society seems unprepared to cater for the social and educational needs of these children.  In this exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Sabrina Jacobucci, aka Flora NW, President of the Association of Afro-Italian Children, reveals the reasons that led to the foundation of the Association, the problems mixed heritage children face in the country, and suggests what should be done to make the education system more responsive to the needs of mixed heritage children.

Sabrina, please share with us the story behind the formation of the Association of Afro-Italian Children.

The Association was initiated by an Italian mother of two mixed-race children born abroad, who, when returning to Italy, started to express the need of meeting other black children since they were the only black children in school, in their block, whenever they went to the park or to after school activities. They started to ask: why aren’t there children like us on TV or on advertisements?  The Italian mother started to look for a group where children could meet other black children, but could only find associations of various migrant communities, or churches which catered for the Nigerian, or the Congolese or the Ghanaian and so forth.  The children could not, though, identify with any ethnic or migrant community in particular, being black Italians. So to answer the children’s need to see themselves represented, this woman started to look for other parents of black or mixed-race children to set up a group where the kids could, at least once a month, meet and feel stronger, in a society where to be black is often neither appreciated nor valued.

When was it founded?

A couple of years ago.

Who was involved?

I, the white Italian mum of Black Italian daughters (who also share an English, Nigerian and Jamaican mixed parentage), had the idea of setting up a group where my children could meet other Afro-Italian children. I thought gathering other parents of black children willing to meet would be easy.

Unfortunately, the number of black and mixed-race children is very low in Rome, especially in my area. So I started to “advertise” on the web, first of all on www.insenegal.org, a site which has a rich forum where a number of mothers of children having a Senegalese father write. But most of them weren’t from Rome. So I wrote to other parents’ forum, but they were attended mostly by parents of white children. And then, on one of these forums, I met the adoptive mum of a girl of Nigerian parentage, who shared the same need as mine. We were then joined by other adoptive and biological parents of black and mixed-race children, thanks to the website I manage http://afroitaliani.splinder.com, where I announce our meetings and other activities…

…From your experience, in Italy, are mixed heritage children facing different problems from those of other children?

Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race. And yes, black and mixed race children definitely face different problems from those of white children…

…Do you think the education system in Italy fully caters for the needs of mixed heritage children?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the education system has even started to consider or understand the needs of mixed heritage children or of black children for that matter. They are invisible to the system because they are not even seen as a group. Also, mixed heritage is a concept that encompasses too broad a category. Our experience is that of parents of mixed-race children, black/white, and as such they face the same problems of institutional racism embedded in the education system black “mono-heritage” children face. I think that to separate mixed-race children from the black children amounts to “fractioning” the black community, and at this moment, when the community needs unity and strength, is not advisable…

Read the entire interview here.

Wuthering Heights realises Brontë’s vision with its dark-skinned Heathcliff

The Guardian
Film Blog
2011-10-21

Tola Onanuga, Freelance Subeditor and Writer

At last, Andrea Arnold has bucked the trend of casting white actors in the role of Emily Brontë’s ‘gypsy’ foundling hero

Andrea Arnold’s forthcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, will see, for the first time, the character of Heathcliff played on screen by a mixed race actor.

The casting of unknown actor James Howson, who is in his early 20s and from Leeds, shouldn’t be surprising given that Heathcliff was described in the original book as a “dark-skinned gypsy” and “a little lascar“—a 19th-century term for Indian sailors. Among the many screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights—which include musicals, TV serials, a Mexican version directed by Luis Buñuel and an ill-conceived teen romcom produced by MTV—a dark-skinned actor has never been given the role.

Even though Brontë passed away in 1848, one can easily imagine the writer turning in her grave at the prospect of so many white actors portraying her “little lascar” throughout history. As any Briton who’s ever watched an American war film knows, it’s common practice for history to be rewritten during the film-making process, with writers often pushing the boundaries of artistic licence to its very limits…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Britannia [Review]

Caliban in London: a postcolonial subject in an imperial capital
2011-10-10

Anindya Raychaudhuri, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Department of English Language and Literature
University College London

Caliban in London has previously reviewed part of the BBC’s new Mixed Race season. Thursday evening saw the screening of the first of a 3 part documentary called Mixed Britannia presented by George Alagiah. Using a mixture of archive footage, interviews with members of the community, and interviews with (unfortunately mainly White) academics and other experts, the programme attempts to trace the origins and development of mixed-race communities in Britain.

Mixed Britannia encapsulates both the best and the worst of the BBC. Great use of archival footage and old photographs, meticulously researched, apparently sympathetic interviewing – one knows the strengths of this type of BBC programming, and this example certainly does not disappoint in that area. The producers of the programme clearly attempt to at least appear to b as inclusive as possible, though partly the nature of archive footage means that when profiling mixed-race families, it is the White bit of the family that gets more of the spotlight. For example, what was noticeably lacking was any sense of the lives of these people before they came to Britain, and what ties they and their mixed-race families might or might not have kept with their ‘homelands’.

The bigger problems with this programme are, however, in the narrative. This episode ranged from 1910 to 1939, so it is not yet clear what narrative of current race-relations will be told in future episodes, but in this instance at least, it was very definitely one of ‘we used to be racist, and now we’re all better’. At multiple points in the programme, Alagiah read out excerpts from racist official documents, and invited the audience to share in the typically BBC self-righteous sense of superiority which can leave no room for the recognition that there are strong remnants of such thinking in today’s official policy…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Politics or the Politics of being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement, and Socio-political Participation in a Contemporary Society

University of Southern California
August 2010
376 pages

Jungmiwha Suk Bullock

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

This dissertation examines the impacts of historical and contemporary racial theories, socio-political movements, and grassroots mobilization efforts of community-based organizations in transforming the politics to define multiracial identity and the “two or more races” population in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach, I investigate the shifting and contested ways the multiracial population is defined in public and private discourses, paying particular attention to the complexities this community raises within and among monoracial identified communities. Examining the multiracial population in the U.S. has a significant and critical place in the larger trajectory of social scientific scholarship on race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities. This body of research counters the argument that multiple identity formation is inconsequential to theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society. This study urges scholars to (re)examine how race and ethnicity continues to be framed, analyzed, interrogated, and understood in ways that are restricted by historically racist/racialized moments that still linger today. These moments, I argue, are sharpened and more pronounced when centering the politics of what it means to claim a multiracial identity in America in the twenty-first century.

Three primary research questions examined in this study are: 1) How do we define the multiracial population in the United States and what do these definitions offer about racial and ethnic ideologies and the future for public policy post-Census 2000?; 2) What critical insights can centering the experiences of multiracial Americans and the efforts to define them on the local, state, and/or national levels (publicly and privately), offer for other groups in American society?; and 3) Under what conditions is it possible to politically mobilize around this shifting and contested category and what are the unmet needs of this emerging population?

The theoretical model for this study was Grounded Theory. Principle data collection methods were the “insider-outsider” and case study research approaches using extensive face-to-face audio and/or photographed interviews; participant and field observations of key local, state, and national events, including U.S. Census proceedings and California Senate Judiciary hearings; and content analysis of primary and secondary documents, including media coverage and organizational archives. Data was collected between 2004 and 2009 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento. These cities exhibited the most heightened multiracial activity across the country in this timeframe. I also investigated exclusive, never before documented, behind the scenes initiatives to recognize the unmet needs of this emerging population through an in-depth case study of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—one of the oldest leading national advocacy organizations for multiracial, multiethnic, and transracially adopted individuals, families, organizations, and allies.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction/Chapter 1: Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: The Challenge of Racial Biology and Hegemonoracial Ideology in a Contemporary Society
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 2: The Multi-Whos?: Unpacking the Historical Discourseon Defining the Multiracial Population in the United States Census and in Social Science Research, 1850 to 2000
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 3: Simultaneous Identities: Comparative Interviews Among a Diverse Combination of Multiracial Experiences
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 4: From Manasseh to AMEA: A Case Study of Multiracial Community Building and Grassroots Activism through the Association of MultiEthnic Americans
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 5: Civically Engaging Identities: Keys to Effective Mobilization Toward Building a Collective Multiracial Community
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 6/Conclusion: Beyond the Politics of Being Multiracial: Toward a Revised Theoretical and Pragmatic Approach to Multiracial Presence in the U.S.
  • Endnotes
• Bibliography

List of Tables

1. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000)
2. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000) and a Historical Trajectory of Racial and Ethnic Theories in the United States
3. Participants Reported Self-Identification
4. Self-Reported Descriptions Given By Participants on Where Primarily Raised
5. Timeline of the Formation of Multiracial Organizations by Decade

List of Figures

1. Multiracial Births in California, 1997
2. Population Projection Excluding Multiracial Identity in California
3. Intersectionality Diagram
4. Intersectionality + Race/Ethnicity/Culture/Nationality Diagram
5. Multiracial Identity + Intersectionality Flowchart Diagram
6. Multi/Monoracial Identity + Intesectionality Venn Diagram
7. Flowchart of “Mulatto” Identity Formation as Depicted by Michael Davenport in “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” (1911)
8. AMEA Organizational Structure
9. Multiracial Complexity Web of Identity/ies

Read the entire dissertation here.

How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

American Sociological Review
Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007)
pages 915-939
DOI: 10.1177/000312240707200604

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Jeronimo O. Muniz
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico’s whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting-an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

Read the entire article here.