Mixed Race Studies

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Dover Publications
May 1995 (Originally published in 1912)
112 pages
5 3/16 x 8 1/4
ISBN 10:  048628512X 
ISBN 13: 9780486285122

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

This remarkable novel documents the life of an American of mixed ethnicity who moves freely in society — from the rural South to the urban North and eventually, Europe. A revolutionary work which not only probes the psychological aspects of “passing for white” but also examines the American caste and class system.

“This damned business of colour”: Passing in African American novels and memoirs

Lehigh University
2005-04-28
230 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3167071
ISBN: 9780542026218

Irina C. Negrea

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

The topic of this dissertation is an analysis of racial passing, as depicted in the novels The House Behind the Cedars by Charles Chesnutt, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson, and Passing by Nella Larsen, as well as in the memoirs The Sweeter the Juice by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Notes of a White Black Woman by Judy Scales-Trent, and Life on the Color Line by Gregory Williams.

Starting from the premise that passing is a complex phenomenon that reinforces and subverts the racial system simultaneously, this dissertation focuses on the subversive side of passing that comes to light especially when the passer is found out—a side that becomes obvious in the reactions it provokes in white racists: horror, fear, disgust, and insecurity.

One other new element that this dissertation brings into the field is a classification of passing that can be used as a tool for the analysis of similar literary works. The majority of passers fall into one of two categories: identificatory and performative. Identificatory passing is predicated on the passer’s identification with the white ideology. It is permanent, and the passer breaks all ties with his/her African American ancestry. At the other end of the spectrum is performative passing, based on the view of race as performance—a matter of props, makeup, and/or behavior. The passer crosses the color line and “acts” white, but in most cases, s/he does not break his/her ties with his/her African American roots and community. Rather, the performative passer tries to acknowledge both his/her racial identities, refusing to be boxed in one narrow racial category. These types of passing do not exist in a “pure” state; there are characters who start as performers of race and end up identifying with whiteness, for example, but the two basic types exist, in one combination or another, in all the stories of passing ever written. These two different types of passing engender different types of subversion of the racial system, and they are discussed as well in this dissertation.

Table of Contents

• Chapter I: “Gone Over on the Other Side:” Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars
• Chapter II: “They Wouldn’t Know you from White:” The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Chapter III: “They Always Come Back:” Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter IV: The Family’s “Heart of Darkness:” Passing in African American Memoirs
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

The short life of a race drug

The Lancet
Volume 379, Issue 9811 (2012-01-14 through 2012-01-20)
pages 114-115
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60052-X

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

The headlines back in June, 2005, read “FDA approves a heart drug for African Americans”. The decision that gave the company NitroMed approval for its drug BiDil exclusively to a “racial group” represented a milestone in US drug policy. The decision ignited a debate that polarised the African American community, confounded proponents of personalised medicine, and dismayed groups opposed to reinscribing racial categories into science. Ever since Ashley Montagu published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race in 1964 [1942?], scientists have reached a broad consensus that “race” applied to human populations has no standing in science…

…In a historical context too, the use of such racial classification is shown to be a subjective process. The concept of “race” in the USA grew out of slavery when state laws dictated racial identity by percentage admixture. A person who self-identifies as African American could have one great-grandfather (or about one-eighth of his or her genome) as the exclusive source of that identity. Homer Plessy was the plaintiff in an 1896 US Supreme Court decision (Plessy v. Ferguson) that established the “separate but equal” foundations of segregation in the USA. Plessy, who was escorted off a train for whites only, was considered black based on the infamous “one drop rule”, even though he considered himself seven-eighths white. By contrast, Jean Toomer, author of the 1923 book Cane, which chronicled the lives of black Americans, sometimes identified himself as black and sometimes as white. Thus, two individuals, both with one-eighth African ancestry, might either be defined by others as black or self-identify as white or black. Why should the drug’s approval for a differentiated group be based upon such quixotic criteria? Despite all the reasons why “race” has no role in science, it was a science-based agency that approved BiDil for a racial group…

…While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that “race” is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that “self-identified race” is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy “self-identified race” is a reliable surrogate? The best evidence derives from the fact that genetic variation conferring disease susceptibility is not equally distributed among ancestral populations. For example, sickle cell anaemia is more prevalent in populations whose ancestry can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa. However, “self-identified race” is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project. For the purpose of the clinical trials, “self-identified race” is interpreted as a dichotomous variable (black or non-black). If race were used as a proxy for ancestral African genomics it should be a continuous function (10%, 30%, 70%, etc). It makes no scientific sense to map a continuous function onto a dichotomous variable…

Read the entire article here or here.

Making Race: Biology and the Evolution of the Race Concept in 20 Century American Thought

Columbia University
December 2008
309 pages

Michael Yudell

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

At the dawn of the 21^st century the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with its own discrete physical, social and intellectual characteristics—is seen by most natural and social scientists as unsound and unscientific. Race and racism, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, are ideas with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. They are concepts that change with time and place; the changes themselves products of a range of variables including time, place, geography, politics, science, and economics. As much as scientists once thought that race and racism were reflections of physical or biological differences, today social scientists, with help from colleagues in the natural sciences, have shown that the once scientific concept of race is in fact a product of history with an unmistakable impact on the American story. This dissertation examines the history of the biological race concept during the 20^th century, studying how the biological sciences helped to shape thinking about human difference. This work argues that in the 20^th century biology and genetics became the arbiter of the meaning of race. This work also brings the story of the evolution of the race concept to the present by examining the early impact of the genomic sciences on race, and by placing it in a contemporary public health context.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: The Permanence of Race
• Chapter 1: A Eugenic Foundation
• Chapter 2: Making Race A Biological Difference
• Chapter 3: Race Problems for Biology
• Chapter 4: Consolidating the Biological Race Concept
• Chapter 5: Race in the Molecular Age
• Conclusion: Race, Genomics, and the Public’s Health
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Obama as Anti-American: Visual Folklore in Right-Wing Forwarded E-mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 125, Number 496, Spring 2012
pages 177-203
DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2012.0018

Margaret Duffy, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of Missouri

Janis Teruggi Page
George Washington University

Rachel Young
Missouri School of Journalism

This paper investigates the group-building potential of forwarded e-mails through a visual analysis of negative images about President Barack Obama. We argue that these e-mails are a form of political digital folklore that may contribute to constructing participants’ individual and group identities. Images amplify the impact and believability of the messages, especially when linked to familiar cultural references and experiences and may lead to increased political polarization and hostility.

Read or purchase the article here.

The ‘Other’ from within: Afro-Germans as Scapegoats for the post-WWII German Society

Postgraduate History Conference: Creating the ‘Other’
Department of History, University of Essex
2011-09-20

Antje Friedrich
Department of English Literature
University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

The theme of the graduate conference this year was ‘Creating the ‘Other’’ throughout history.  We were very pleased to welcome a large and diverse group delegates and presenters from a number of institutions who made for an engaging and lively audience.  We were also very happy to welcome Dr. John Bulaitis, of Canterbury Christchurch University, to provide the keynote address to the conference.  Contributions were arranged into four panels, which explored the relevance of historical processes of ‘Othering’ to the realms of national identity, crime, gender and colonialism.  Papers presented covered a multitude of topics, periods and contexts, ranging from the construction of persons of colour as servants in late 19th and early 20th century France, Germany and the United States, to the origins of sub-cultural cannabis-use in mid-20th century London, the utilisation of humour in the construction of masculinities during the English Civil Wars, and the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in the governance of the colonial ‘other’ in British-controlled Hong Kong in the late-19th century.  It is intended that a selection of papers presented shall form the basis of this years’ working papers series issued by the Department of History later on in 2011.  We would like to thank the Department for their generosity in funding this event.

For a long time in the collective German national memory, Afro-Germans had only been a side note to which little attention was paid. With the emergence of autobiographical works representing the perspective of Afro-German people, their struggle in society gained a public face. This article focuses on Ika Hügel-Marshall’s work Invisible Women: Growing up Black in Germany and the representation of her social struggle in post-WWII German society. Her depiction of the impact institutions had on her life – institutions that were meant to support the child’s development, but in her case prolonged the construction of the ‘Other’ as an outsider of society – will be accentuated.

The youth welfare office responsible for her, the orphanage she was sent to and the school she attended, represented the social spirit of the post-WWII era during which the anger of having lost the war and being under the control of the Allied Powers was projected onto people like Hügel-Marshall, who in the eyes of many Germans constituted the ‘Other’. Thus, this paper aims to highlight those social processes that constituted barriers for the development of the self and the mechanisms which helped Hügel-Marshall to finally break through and lead a self-determined life in a German society that often took the outward appearance as a decisive feature for creating an “in” and “out” group.

Read the entire paper here.

‘Mutts like Me’: Multiracial Students’ Perceptions of Barack Obama

Qualitative Sociology
Volume 35, Number 2 (2012)
pages 183-200
DOI: 10.1007/s11133-012-9226-4

Michael P. Jeffries, Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Existent sociological studies of multiracialism in the United States focus on identity construction, the cultural and legislative battle over multiracial categorization, and the implications of demographic shifts towards an increasingly “mixed race” population. This article engages literature from each of these areas, and uses data from in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial students to document their perceptions of President Barack Obama and trace the symbolic boundaries of multiracial identity. Interviews are specifically directed towards the influence of race on Obama’s identity management and political career, the relationship between Obama and respondents’ multiracial identity, and Obama’s impact on America’s racial history. Respondents hold favorable opinions of the President despite his inconsistent affirmation of multiracial identity. They believe that emphasis on Obama’s blackness rather than multiracialism is the unfortunate result of both personal choices and political pressures. In addition, the cohort insists that racism remains is a major factor in Obama’s career and in America at large.

Read the entire article here.

Role of identity integration on the relationship between perceived racial discrimination and psychological adjustment of multiracial people

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 59, Number 2 (April 2012)
pages 240-250

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University, Phoenix

Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Rudy Guevarra, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Blair A. Harrington

This study examined relations between perceived racial discrimination, multiracial identity integration (i.e., racial distance and racial conflict), and psychological adjustment (i.e., distress symptoms, positive affect, and negative affect) of 263 multiracial adults, using an online cross-sectional survey design. As hypothesized, higher levels of perceived racial discrimination was related to lower levels of psychological adjustment (i.e., higher distress symptoms and negative affect). Also, higher levels of multiracial identity integration with low racial conflict was related to higher levels of psychological adjustment (i.e., lower distress symptoms and negative affect), whereas higher levels of multiracial identity integration with low racial distance was related to higher levels of psychological adjustment (i.e., lower negative affect). Finally, multiracial identity integration (i.e., lower racial conflict) moderated the relationship between perceived racial discrimination and psychological adjustment (i.e., negative affect) with results suggesting multiracial identity integration related to low racial conflict buffers the negative effects of perceived racial discrimination on psychological adjustment. Findings from this study are discussed in terms of future research on the psychological well-being of multiracial individuals and implications for clinical practice with multiracial adults.

Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris

TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal
1 | 2011 : Senses of the South / Référendums populaires
10 pages, 20 paragraphs

Suzanne W. Jones, Professor of English
University of Richmond

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic bell hooks argues that “no one seems to know how to tell the story” of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: “that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.” Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if told, would explain how sexuality could serve as “a force subverting and disrupting power relations, unsettling the oppressor/oppressed paradigm” (57-58). By rethinking and reimagining the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and historians have exposed this “suppressed story,” the bare bones of which were first made public in 1802 by journalist James Callendar during Jefferson’s first term as U.S. President and then covered up by professional historians for almost 175 years.

As novelist Ralph Ellison pointed out, historical fiction must sometimes serve as the repository for historical truth when the collective historical memory has repressed the facts. In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud’s best-selling novel Sally Hemings allowed readers to enter the mind and heart of the shadowy figure that historian Fawn Brodie had brought back into the public consciousness in 1974, and in so doing enabled readers to believe that Jefferson might have had a long-term relationship with her. Chase-Riboud’s fictional portrait clearly upset Jefferson’s defenders, but the word that CBS might make the novel into a miniseries unnerved them, causing historians Virginius Dabney and Dumas Malone to intervene. Although they claimed that they were worried about historical accuracy, historian Annette Gordon-Reed believes that they were even more worried by the nature of the medium itself: “If a beautiful woman appears on screen as a capable and trustworthy person, […] all talk about impossibility [of a liaison] would be rendered meaningless” (Jefferson and Hemings, 182-83). Over fifteen years later, the film and the miniseries that eventually were produced have proved Gordon-Reed right. Today visitors to Jefferson’s Monticello routinely view, seemingly without surprise or dismay, a twenty-minute documentary that briefly mentions the liaison…

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In many ways, Obama’s story provides a possible model for black­ descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness. In the larger sense, Obama reconciles the tensions between what G. Reginald Daniel has called “multigenerational multiracials,” that is to say, the category that most African Americans fall into as a racially mixed people, and “first-generation” multiracial people who have one parent that identifies as monoracially white and another that identifies as monoracially black. The question is: does this require an African American identification or can it simply be a multiracial identity that affirms one’s connection to the African Diaspora and the black experience? Had Obama identified more with the white side of his parental lineage, or even more strongly as a mixed race person, many Americans might not today know the name Barack Obama. The important point to take away from this memoir is that in the end, the protagonist, the hero, does not choose a mixed race identity but, rather, an African American one. To do otherwise would surely have antagonized and alienated African American support and acceptance. Anything less than full and absolute acceptance of an African American identity would have cost Obama severely.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, “Mutt like me: Barack Obama and the Mixed Race Experience in Historical Perspective,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 149-150.