Mixed Race Studies

Guidance document 10: Dual Heritage pupils

Ethnic Minority Services
Nottingham City Council Children Services
November 2005
20 pages

Jane Daffé, Senior EMA Consultant
Nottingham City, LA

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Terminology
3. Statistics
4. Identity
5. Dual Heritage Voice
6. Educational research
7. Curriculum, resources, role models
8. Conclusion
9. Appendix
   1. Recommended Resources Reflecting the Lives of Dual Heritage Children and Families
   2. Poem: Blended
   3. Dual Heritage Quiz

Introduction

The primary focus of this document are children of Dual Heritage who have one White parent and the other of African Caribbean background. Although pupils of Dual Heritage in our schools have a much wider range of ethnic backgrounds (White/Asian etc), the specified target group is our most significant Dual Heritage group in Nottingham, both in terms of numbers and concerns related to underachievement and exclusion. Some factors and experiences will be of relevance to other pupils of differing Dual Heritage, some of relevance to other Black pupil groups.

I hope to have produced a guidance document that will be of practical use to teachers in schools; within each sub-section are highlighted actions and recommendations which will enable schools to audit their current situation, develop their practice and create an increasingly inclusive whole-school ethos that is supportive and relevant for Dual Heritage pupils and families.

Terminology

The term Dual Heritage will be employed throughout this document; although labels are rarely unanimously agreed upon, it is currently considered by many to be a more acceptable and positive description than the still frequently used ‘mixed race’ (our pupils in schools often use the latter, and sometimes still the term ‘half-caste’).

Why not ‘mixed race’?
It is scientifically agreed that different ‘races’ do not exist, only one Human Race, therefore a shift from using the term ‘race’ seems to be the common order. Further, the word ‘mixed’ can have negative connotations in relation to identity e.g. ‘mixed up’, implying confusion and also that the original elements from both heritages are inevitably lost or changed.

Why not half-caste?
‘Caste’ is derived from the Portuguese word ‘casta’, meaning lineage or breed. In human culture, it refers to rigid social divisions, as in the Hindu caste system. Societies with a low degree of social mobility such as South Africa under apartheid and the practice of slavery in the Southern United States could be described as caste-based societies – the connotations of oppression are clear. Moreover, ‘half’ clearly implies lacking and incomplete, indicating inferiority…

Read the entire report here.

The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More

EnterText: an interdisciplinary humanities e-journal
Volume 1, Number 1 (Winter 2000) Americas, Americans
pages 127-148

Joseph Mills, Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro—two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
– W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

What do we want?… We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all?… We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?
– W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1921)

In 1931 George S. Schuyler published Black No More, a satire about Americans’ obsession with race. The book was controversial, in part, because Schuyler mocked African-American leaders. The novel contains parodies of Marcus Garvey, N.A.A.C.P. figures, and Tuskegee leaders. For example, Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, a caricature of W.E. B. DuBois, writes ornate overblown editorials for The Dilemma, claims an “exotic” heritage, and “like most Negro leaders, he deified the black woman but abstained from employing aught save octoroons.” DuBois, himself, however, praised the book. He recognized that it would be “abundantly misunderstood,” because, “the writer of satire . . . is always misunderstood by the simple.” Although Black No More contained “scathing criticism of Negro leaders,” DuBois noted with admiration that the satire then “passes over and slaps the white people just as hard and unflinchingly straight in the face.” In many ways, Black No More demonstrates satire’s democratic potential. Mockery becomes the great leveller, and by ridiculing all, the novel calls into question racial and class hierarchies. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, Schuyler stated his intentions: “What I have tried to do in this novel is to laugh the color question out of school by showing up its ridiculousness and absurdity…I have tried… to portray the spectacle as a combination madhouse, burlesque show and Coney Island.”

Unfortunately, as DuBois anticipated, the novel has been misunderstood. In a 1971 introduction to the book, Charles Larson states, “It would be easy—and some people would perhaps say better—to ignore Schuyler’s first novel,” and Margaret Perry’s comment that “we cannot dismiss [Black No More] entirely” reveals a desire to do just that. In fact, for decades Schuyler’s work overall has been denigrated or overlooked. To give only one example, in Cary Wintz’s Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, a table of “Year-by-Year Publication of Major Works of the Harlem Renaissance, 1922-1935” has almost fifty titles but does not include Schuyler’s books. In the 1990s, however, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen recovered a significant amount of Schuyler’s pulp fiction, and, in doing so, they demonstrated the need to re-evaluate Schuyler’s work. In particular, Black No More, Schuyler’s major literary achievement, needs to be reassessed. Considered by Arthur Davis to be “the best work of prose satire to come from the New Negro Movement,” and one of the few works of the time to use satire, the novel makes an important contribution to the discourse of race and national identity…

…The book’s most damning indictment of this “urge towards whiteness” is a shocking lynching scene. Southern aristocrat Arthur Snobbcraft, the head of an elitist Anglo-Saxon association, joins forces with the Knights of Nordica to run a presidential campaign. Snobbcraft organizes a massive genealogy project to determine how much of the population has Negro blood. He intends to use the results to whip up national hysteria over the dangers of miscegenation; however, the plan backfires when his chief researcher, Dr. Buggerie, discovers that at least fifty million people who are considered “white” have a mixed heritage, including Buggerie, Knights of Nordica leader Givens, and Snobbcraft himself. After his opponents steal the information and give it to the newspapers, Snobbcraft tries to flee the country, but his plane runs out of gas and has to land in Mississippi. Snobbcraft and Buggerie decide to disguise themselves with shoe-polish blackface, but they run into members of the True Love Christ Lover’s Church, a group which has been praying for one last Negro to lynch. When they wipe off their blackface, they are accepted as Caucasians until one of the few church members who can read sees a newspaper article detailing their mixed ancestry. Snobbcraft and Buggerie are then mutilated, tortured and killed in an orgiastic frenzy…

…There occur two dynamics in Black No More: a whitening at the level of skin and a blackening at the level of blood. Although the process of Black No More, Inc. “whitens,” the genealogical research of Buggerie “blackens” at least half of the population by revealing their mixed ancestry. When he learns of the research, Givens acknowledges, “I guess we’re all niggers now;” his comment echoes one made earlier by one of the owners of Black No More who noted that “Everything that looks white ain’t white in this man’s country.” In fact, almost nothing is white in the country. Schuyler dedicates Black No More to “all Caucasians in the great republic who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert that there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs of branches on their family trees.” The tone conveys his doubt that anyone can do this. Schuyler believed that America refused to admit that it consisted of a mulatto culture. In this sense, when he states in “The Negro-Art Hokum” that “the American Negro is just plain American,” he is insisting not only on the “Americanness” of the Negro, but also on the “Negroness” of America…

Read the entire article here.

ENGL 3270.03: Contemporary Canadian Literature: Crossing the Line

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Summer 2007

Dr. C. Dawson

Our study of contemporary Canadian literature will be loosely divided into three sections, each organized around the idea of “crossing the line.” In the first section the line under consideration will be the border that defines this country. By way of example, our discussion of Tom King’s wonderfully funny story “Borders” might draw on his argument that the 49th parallel is a “figment of somebody else’s imagination.” Likewise, our readings of Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Wade Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm might involve a consideration of the ways they each use the metaphor of border crossing to understand their mixed-race identities.

In the second part of the course we will study a number of stories and poems about characters who are seen to have “crossed a line” in the sense that they have acted in a way that is widely perceived to be transgressive or taboo. Here, for example, we might compare the representation of sexuality in texts as different as Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, a rock-infused Mennonite coming-of-age story, and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, a post-apocalyptic allegory set on Noah’s Ark.

In the final section, the line that is “crossed” has to do with genre. While building on our earlier discussions of race, nationality, and sexuality in contemporary Canadian literature, we will focus on works by Dionne Brand and Anne Carson, both of whom ostentatiously mix genres—poetry, fiction, autobiography, travelogue, opera!—with great effect.

Portrait of Crimean War Nurse Mary Seacole Acquired by National Portrait Gallery

artdaily.org
2012-02-12

Mary Seacole by Albert Charles Challen, 1869. ^©National Portrait Gallery, London.

LONDON.- The only known painting of Mary Seacole, the black Victorian nurse regarded as one of the most significant figures to emerge from the Crimean War, is to remain at the National Portrait Gallery where it has been on loan since 2004. The iconic portrait has been bought for £130, 000 through a public appeal by the Gallery and a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £96,200.

Painted by Albert Challen in 1869, the portrait—which was discovered in 2004 by its owner, the biographer, writer and historian, Helen Rappaport—shows Seacole wearing the three medals which she was awarded for her service.

Born in Jamaica (c.1805 – 1881), Seacole was a nurse, adventurer and writer whose bravery, compassion and determination mark her as an exceptional figure in Victorian society. She travelled independently to Balaklava where she and her business partner, Thomas Day, opened the British Hotel between the harbour and British Headquarters. It served as an officers’ club, a canteen for troops and a base for her nursing activities. She remained in the Crimea until July 1856. She was a familiar figure to British newspaper readers through reports in The Times, Punch and elsewhere. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, was published in 1857 and sold well.

Since the 1970s, the development of a Black and Asian historiography has given her a central place in black British history. In 2004, Seacole was voted Greatest Black Briton in an online poll (http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/). As an inspirational figure in British history and with a growing reputation she has also begun to be regarded as an exemplary figure among all audiences regardless of ethnicity. With no formal training, nor from a wealthy middle-class background, Seacole overcame both racial and gender restrictions to establish herself as a notable humanitarian whose hands-on approach to nursing has become an inspiration to nurses today…

Read the entire article here.

Mixing It Up: Supporting Multiracial Students in Racial Affinity Groups

American College Personnel Association
ACPA 2012 Annual Convention
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-03-24 through 2012-03-28

Session Information:
Wednesday, 2012-03-28
08:30-09:30 EDT (Local Time)
Kentucky International Convention Center, 212 & 213

Heather C. Lou, FYE Coordinator
University of Vermont

Adam J. Ortiz, House Director
Hampshire College

Rachel Luna
University of the Pacific

Racial affinity groups in higher education have significant potential to advance positive identity development for people of all races. The dynamic between dominant and non-dominant social identities calls for individuals to be divided into binary racial affinity groups of White and People of Color (POC). Frustration, anxiety, and feelings of marginality can arise when multiracial people are asked to choose between groups. In this presentation, will discuss tactics to best support multiracial students through affinity group facilitation.

For more information, click here.

Spoilt for choice?

New Law Journal: Leading on debate, litigation & dispute resolution
Vol 162, Issue 7498
2012-01-26

Adrian Jack, Barrister & Rechtsanwalt
Enterprise Chambers

Encouraging greater judicial diversity is no easy task, says Adrian Jack

The government is consulting on creating greater diversity in the judiciary. Where candidates for judicial appointment are of similar merit, membership of a “protected category” should be a trump card, allowing the candidate with that status to be appointed over the rival.

The idea is a simple one. If a white and a black candidate are of roughly similar merit, the black candidate should be appointed. Likewise, if there were a male and a female candidate, the female should go through.

Immediately though a problem arises. What if a black man is up against a white woman? Does the black man’s ethnicity trump the other candidate’s sex? Or vice versa?

One solution in such a case would be to disregard the protected characteristic of both candidates. However, this would not necessarily increase diversity. Take a woman applying for a tribunal post. In tribunals 38% of judges are women (against 51% in the population at large), whereas the percentage of black, Asian and minority ethnic judges is 10.5%—more than the nine per cent in the population (Report of the Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity, para 18). A woman should surely be able to argue that the black male candidate’s ethnicity should be ignored (because the tribunal judiciary is already sufficiently ethnically diverse), so giving her the tie-break.

Indeed the problems do not stop there. The consultation implies that it will be readily apparent which candidates have protected characteristics. Yet this is not so. Who is “black”? Someone of mixed race must qualify. But what of someone who is one eighth of black heritage? Or one sixteenth?

In a case of race discrimination in the employment tribunal it is normally sufficient for claimants to self-describe their ethnicity. If a claimant has such a small proportion of black ancestry that they show no physical or cultural signs of that ethnicity, then the claimant is unlikely to show that he was treated less favourably on the ground of his race…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Obituaries: Fredi Washington, 90, Actress; Broke Ground for Black Artists

The New York Times
1994-06-30

Sheila Rule

Fredi Washington, one of the first black actresses to gain recognition for her work on stage and in film, died on Tuesday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Conn., where she lived. She was 90.

The cause was pneumonia, which developed after a stroke, said her sister, Isabel Powell.

Miss Washington’s best-known performance was as the young mulatto who passes for white in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” Her performance was so convincing that she was accused of denying her heritage in her private life.

“She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington and his band,” said Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author and a friend of Ms. Washington’s. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’ “…

Read the entire obituary here.

Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington

Theatre Survey
Volume 45, Issue 1 (2004)
pages 19-40
DOI: 10.1017/S0040557404000031

Cheryl Black, Associate Professor of Acting, Theatre History/Theory/Criticism
University of Missouri, Columbia

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

Purchase the article here.

Book Review: Go White, Young Man

Vanderbilt Law Review
Volume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30)
10 pages

Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law
University of North Carolina School of Law

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Sharfstein’s book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the color line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. These case studies tell us what it is to be American—how race is central to our identity, how we use race to take down opponents or to exclude—and how the line separating black and white is sometimes porous. However, is not the story of race and American legal history about the ways that race is defined by law and by norms? Race mattered because people policed the line separating blacks and whites. That many states classified people with a small percentage of African ancestry as white suggests that it was possible to move across the color line. Still, the cases where the color line was policed, rather than crossed, are significant.

Our nation’s struggle with race is now about one-third of a millennium long. So there is a lot for Daniel Sharfstein’s epic work of American history, The Invisible Line, to engage as it sweeps across centuries—from Virginia in the 1600s to Washington, DC, in the 1950s—and as it details generations of lives, from humble farmers in Appalachia to heirs of Gilded Age merchants. Where most other people who have looked at such issues focus on the chasm between white and black, Sharfstein looks at people on the line separating black and white. He is able in this way to get at key—and often overlooked—issues, such as how people have crossed the color line in America and what efforts to cross and police it tell us about our national struggle with race and with equality.

To detail the sine curve of attitudes towards race, Sharfstein offers three case studies of how racial categorization has functioned and how it kept (or attempted to keep) African-Americans in their place. The book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. Sharfstein’s elegant prose illuminates how the color line functioned for people on both sides of it. For those who could do so, there were great incentives to claim to be white rather than black. In one era, race could define who might be a slave; in later eras, it was central to who could live in desirable locations, who could go to the most desirable schools, who could have access to the best government jobs. From statutes to social norms, African-Americans were told that they were inferior and had to maintain their place. Thus, those who might pass for white—those who had light enough skin color and perhaps the geographic mobility to mask their family history—often did so.

Some of the story of passing is well known. President Warren G. Harding is said to have remarked in response to an allegation that he had African ancestry, “How do I know? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” Some of the best-known literature of the Jim Crow era was about crossing the color line, like Nella Larson’s Passing. And even antebellum literature often addressed the crossing of the line from black to white. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, has a vignette about a light-skinned former slave who passed for white. Yet, even though we know that families crossed the color line (or attempted to), one wonders if the most important lessons from Sharfstein’s book are the ways the line was successfully policed rather than the ways it was crossed…

…We learn a great deal about the policing of the color line in Sharfstein’s book. Attempts to prevent passing sometimes failed, as in the Regulator Movement and in the Spencers’ Appalachia. In both of those cases, opponents of families who had once been identified as African-American unsuccessfully claimed that they were still African-American. But Sharfstein illustrates numerous occasions when the line was successfully policed: in Washington, DC, after Reconstruction, when O.S.B. Wall helped lead a western exodus movement; in the early twentieth century, when disfranchisement of blacks led to loss of representation in Congress and loss of civil service jobs, such as Stephen Wall’s at the Government Printing Office; and when an heir to the Field fortune—who, as a member of the Gibson family, had some African ancestry—put on a display at the Field Museum about the races of mankind.

We learn that statutes helped police the color line. For instance, statutes defined the blood quantum that permitted one to be considered white. Yet even when statutes defined one as black, social norms often classified a person as white. Sharfstein makes a bold statement about the porous nature of the color line in regard to slavery: “The difference between black and white was less about ‘blood’ or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white.” This argument shifts the basis for being considered black from blood quantum to status—though the two were often highly correlated…

Read the entire review here.

Batson Revisited in America’s “New Era” of Multiracial Persons

Seton Hall Law Review
Volume 33, Issue 1 (2003)
Article 3
pages 67-108

John Terrence A. Rosenthal

Since two bloods course within your veins, Both Jam’s and Japhet’s intermingling; One race forever doomed to serve, The other bearing freedom’s likeness.
—Poem from Jacob Steendam to his multiracial son

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction—to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
—Letter from President George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island (Sept. 9, 1790)

I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
—Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine (1789)

INTRODUCTION

From the time of this country’s founding, America has always been a multiracial society. In the coming decades, America’s racial and ethnic diversity will continue to increase. The 2000 Census evidences the present and coming racial complexity. Mandated by the Constitution, this decennial census, for the first time allowed individuals to chose more than one race in identifying their racial heritage. The preliminary results of the 2000 Census show that the number of individuals claiming multiracial status is not insignificant. As many as 2.4 percent of our nation’s citizens consider themselves multiracial; and in California, the nation’s most populace state, the percentage is 4.7.

Given our society’s historical penchant for discrimination against minority racial groups, persons of multiracial backgrounds do and will continue to face many of the same problems related to racial discrimination that other minority racial groups in our country have historically faced. These problems include, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and discrimination in the administration of our criminal justice system. Due to the difficulty often associated with distinguishing which racial groups multiracial individuals belong to or derive from, the problems of discrimination will present these people with unique, and often unrecognized and unaddressed problems. This Article will address one of these potential problems, which is associated with the administration of the criminal justice system: discrimination based on race in the use of peremptory challenges during the selection of jurors.

This country has an extensive history of racial discrimination in the context of the jury selection process. Although both the courts and legislatures have attempted to deal with the problem of racial discrimination in the jury selection process, the solutions provided do not solve the problem for those persons of multiracial descent who may not be readily identified or perceived as racial minorities. In particular, it is a challenge for society to prevent the racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges in the jury selection process, if only one side in the litigation recognizes a multiracial potential juror as being multiracial and discriminates based on that person’s racial makeup. What if a juror is dismissed from the jury pool by one side due to his or her racial heritage, but neither the other side nor the judge recognizes the discrimination because the racial makeup of the juror is not readily apparent to either?

The present jury selection process, mandated by Batson v. Kentucky to address racial discrimination in the use of peremptory challenges, depends upon the ability of the judge and the attorneys for both sides to perceive the racial makeup of the potential juror. Only then will one party be on notice of the possibility of racial discrimination and raise the proper challenge. If this party does not recognize the dismissed person as being of multiracial descent, then the constitutional violation goes undiscovered and unremedied. Therefore, Batson, as it is presently structured and enforced, may not, and most likely will not solve the problem of racial discrimination in the use of peremptory challenges to exclude multiracial persons from juries.

In Part I, the Article will review the legal and societal history of racial discrimination against multiracial individuals in our country. Part II will then examine the historical problem of racial discrimination in the context of the jury selection process and describe the present judicial remedy used to address this problem. In Part III, the Article will discuss the results of the 2000 Census, the implications of this data with regard to the racial make-up of juries, and how these data and anecdotal evidence suggest the existence of a unique problem of racial discrimination against multiracial individuals in the jury selection process. Finally, Part IV will suggest some potential remedies for this “vexing” problem…

Read the entire article here.