Mixed Race Studies

Meet Steve Riley—Creator of Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Radio
Wednesday, 2012-07-18, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT, 17:00 BST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us as we meet Steven Riley, creator of MixedRaceStudies.org which is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism. The site has nearly 4,500 posts which consists of links to over +2,400 articles, ≈800 books, 500 dissertations/papers/reports, ≈200 multimedia items, 200 quotes/excerpts, etc. The site has been called the “most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical mixed-race theory” by a leading scholar in the field.

Steve has been an Information Technology professional for 25 years in the D.C. area and is currently Director of Database Development and Design at a trade association in Washington D.C.  His areas of expertise are application programming, database and website development.

When he is not developing software applications, he spends his time at home in Silver Spring, Maryland with his artist wife Julia of 25 years (the best thing that ever happened to him) working on his photography and reading books on history and sociology.

Download the episode here (00:45:05).

The talk of Obama as a presidential contender centers on this power to unite. But if Obama’s capacity for racial unification is to be credibly assessed, then the white heritage with which he is intimately familiar must be acknowledged as prominently as his black identity is. His black identity has been imposed without incident and paraded in public with fanfare. Yet, while Obama is known as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he in fact is more probably the periodical’s first biracial president. He is celebrated as only the fifth African-American ever elected to the United States Senate, although he is more accurately among a tiny group of Americans of equal black and white heritage who have been elected to the United States Senate. It is as if the well researched and now-officially-recognized racial category for mixed Americans does not exist-or, if it does, never should be taken seriously as a category of its own, lest history be subject to significant revision informed by an enlightened embrace of ethnic distinctions that matter to every American’s identity.

Amos N. Jones, “Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here,” Thurgood Marshall Law Review, Volume 31 (2005): 84-85.

Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here

Thurgood Marshall Law Review
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 79-100

Amos N. Jones, Professor of Law
Campbell University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Given Americans’ warm bipartisan response to Senator Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the realist is constrained to applaud with them. The fact that voters of all ethnicities enthusiastically back a man apparently black who, at first glance, is fairly critical of the status quo indicates that the country is more open-minded than it used to be. Once the applause has subsided, however, the realist is further constrained to take a hard look at the facts as opposed to the rhetoric accompanying Obama’s stardom. His globetrotting memoir and media appearances, while uplifting and entertaining, have proved unsatisfactory in delivering the obviously critical thinker’s original answer to the big question that has remained unaddressed since the euphoria of 2004, when numerous journalists proclaimed Obama the new black political hope: When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?

This essay contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man. After explaining the history of the “one-drop rule” given legal force by a rarely considered holding of Plessy v. Ferguson that remains good law even today, the essay criticizes the thoughtless imposition of the black label upon Obama, suggesting possible reasons for his allowing Americans to minimize or ignore his substantially more dominant white heritage. Without suggesting specific regimes for categorization, the essay concludes by arguing that the time has come for public and private law to recognize different degrees of blackness, especially now that the country’s census allows Americans to categorize themselves in more than one racial group…

Read the entire article here.

Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Duke University Press
2012
400 pages
71 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5085-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5067-5

Edited by:

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies
Duke University

Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or “snapshots,” highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
• 1. “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler
• 2. “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill
• 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach
  • Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney
• 5. Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman
• 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein
  • Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” / Suzanne Schneider
• 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace
  • Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 9. “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford
  • Snapshot 4. The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The arresting eye: Race and the detection of deception

University of Southern California
December 2005
282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3220115
ISBN: 9780542713217

Jinny Huh

A 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 (ENGLISH)

With increasing rates of miscegenation and racially invisible bodies, how is race to be determined? This dissertation examines the dynamics and discourse of race detection through a comparative analysis of detective fiction and passing narratives, two genres that witnessed a simultaneous rise during the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the detective fiction genre in many ways prospers and responds to the anxiety of racial indecipherability by creating a systematic method of detection. By examining narratives of detection and passing written by both white and ethnic authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Earl Derr Biggers to Pauline Hopkins and Winnifred Eaton, among others, this study demonstrates that the politics and mechanics of race detection is highly specific to the eye of the gazer attuned to distinguishing the signs of race. For example, while Dupin and Holmes may exhibit mystically and supernaturally intuitive powers, Pauline Hopkins (author of the first African American detective in Hagar’s Daughter) shows that intuition and race detection is a necessary component of the African American community. On the other hand, Winnifred Eaton (the first Asian American novelist) responds to the obsession with detection by promoting a rhetoric of undetection in the emergence of Asian American fiction. Finally, in response to Eaton’s celebration of undetection within the Asian American context, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan series demonstrate the anxieties of promoting an Asian American detective hero during the height of Yellow Peril paranoia.

In addition to examining the politics of race detection in literature, this dissertation also explores how numerous disciplines formulate their own concepts of “racial knowledges” via a discourse of detection (such as film studies, visual studies, law, ethnography, and literary history). As such, through a comparative focus which encompasses multiple levels (19th/20th century, male/female, British/American, African American/Asian American, literature/film), my study also addresses the potential threat and implications of racial erasure to Ethnic Studies specifically and Civil Rights overall.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection
• Chapter Two: Intuitive Faculties and Racial Clairvoyance: Pauline Hopkins and the Emergence of Multiethnic Detective Fiction
• Chapter Three: The Legacy of Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Ambidexterity, Undetection as Guerilla Tactics, and the Emergence of Asian American Fiction
• Chapter Four: “The Jaundiced Eye”: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

New York University Press
November 2012
272 pages
10 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814765463
Paper ISBN: 9780814765470

Antonio López, Assistant Professor of English
George Washington University

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.

López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives

University of California, Los Angeles
2005
158 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3175169
ISBN: 9780542133046

Susan Elaine Bausch

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Between approximately 1880 and 1925, large numbers of legally black Americans crossed the color line and identified as white; in common parlance, they “passed.” After Reconstruction, the South attempted to legislate the separation of the races by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation and prohibited miscegenation (at least within marriage). This meant that many passers were not just violating a social taboo by crossing the color line, they were also breaking the law. Even in the North, there were some anti-miscegenation laws on the books, although convention and prejudice probably played a bigger role in limiting mixed-race marriages. In effect, these laws made it a crime for a black person to do what a white person did, which means that blackness itself was criminalized.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Imitation White and Secret Murderers: The Criminalization of Blackness in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Chapter Two: Feminine Transgressions: Crossing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
• Chapter Three: Passing for What?: Joe Christmas’s Racial Uncertainty and Criminal Fate in William Faulkner’s Light in August
• Chapter Four: A Passing Success: The Cost of Mobility in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

A problem that consistently confronts racist law makers in the question of defining who is “Negro” and who is “white.” In general, two schools of “thought” prevail is the United States on this issue. In about nine states a Negro is anyone who had a grandparent who was a Negro. The laws generally define such a person as “having one-eighth or more Negro blood” or as an “octoroon.” The other definition of Negro is used in at least six states: a Negro is any person who has “any trace of Negro blood.” The circularity of these statements does not seem to trouble the opponents of miscegenation.

Virginia provides an interesting example of racist legal gymnastics. Whites in that state can marry neither Negroes nor American Indians. In Virginia, a Negro is a person who has any Negro ancestor, and an American Indian is a person who had at least one Indian grandparent. If someone has one-sixteenth or less “Indian blood” then he is a white. But Virginia still hasn’t decided what you are if you have one-eighth Indian heritage, i.e. one of your great-grandparents was an Indian. Furthermore, if a man is an inhabitant of an Indian tribal reservation and has at least one Indian grandparent and less than one-sixteenth “Negro blood,” then despite the state’s definition of a Negro he may be regarded as an Indian on the reservation. Once he leaves the reservation, however, he undergoes a legal metamorphosis and becomes a Negro. Of course he can then move to Mississippi, where the “octoroon” requirement prevails, and thus become a Caucasian.

Oklahoma courts have decided that American Indians are “white” and therefore may not marry “any person of African descent.” In Alabama, however, Indians are mulattoes, according to the courts, and therefore cannot marry whites. Filipinos in Louisiana must be able to prove that they are “not basically negroid” before they can marry whites. Indiana courts have revealed that “all Mexicans are not white persons and some of them are negroes,” and therefore non-Negro Mexicans can marry either Negroes or whites.

Peter Cumminos, “Race, Marriage, and Law,” The Harvard Crimson, December 17, 1963. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/12/17/race-marriage-and-law-pamerican-racism/

“May she read liberty in your eyes?” Beecher, Boucicault and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women’s Racially Indeterminate Bodies

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages. 127-144
DOI: 10.1353/dtc.2012.0007

Lisa Merrill, Professor of Speech Communication, Rhetoric, Performance Studies
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Prelude

In 1856 Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, an avid abolitionist, first used the pulpit of his Brooklyn church as the site from which he staged mock slave auctions of young biracial enslaved girls. Beecher enacted several such performances in the lead-up to the Civil War. Appealing to his congregation at Plymouth Church (the basement of which functioned as the “Grand Central Depot” of the Underground Railroad), Beecher banked on his congregation’s empathy, and enacted what his wife later described as “an object lesson in Southern slavery . . . so that everybody could see what slave-dealing really meant, and might be stirred to help pay for the liberation of the victims of a system that was sanctioned by American law, but condemned by the law of God.”

At the same time that Beecher staged his “mock slave auctions” of actual enslaved girls, however, images of enslaved and fugitive African Americans occupied different places in the social imaginary of mid-nineteenth-century Americans and Britons. Audiences encountered representations of the plight of enslaved Black Americans in the contexts of the popular theatre (where they were portrayed by white actors), or the abolition platform where fugitive and free African Americans shared narratives of their escape. While crafting their appeals explicitly to provoke the emotional response of their audiences, abolitionists like Beecher often expressed ambivalent relationships to theatricality and those tools of performance deemed appropriate to the stage venues, rather than speakers’ platforms.

In the first section of this essay I examine Beecher’s staging of “mock auctions,” his use of his church for their setting, his embodiment of the role of the minister as both liberator and “salesman” (of faith, of redemption, of human beings), and the problematics of framing appeals to audience empathy through the performative display of enslaved young women, despite Beecher’s avowed abolitionist intentions. In the second section I explore a conflict that I have discovered was played out in the New York press between the fervidly antitheatre Beecher and playwright Dion Boucicault—a conflict in which sympathy for actors and slaves vied for advocacy and in which the feelings aroused in the actual and conceptual spaces of the pulpit and the stage were laid bare for scrutiny. In the third section I examine Boucicault’s play The Octoroon and disparate responses to this play and to its racially-indeterminate enslaved heroine by theatre audiences.

Henry Ward Beecher: Staging and Seeing Mock Slave Auctions

In an article published in 1896, nine years after Beecher’s death, Beecher’s widow Eunice recounted the first mock slave auction her husband staged in Plymouth Church. As Eunice Beecher recalled, “on Sunday morning of June 1, 1856 . . . at eight o’clock people began gathering by the hundreds in front of the church . . . every available foot of space was occupied, and thousands were outside, unable to gain admission.” At the conclusion of the sermon, Beecher announced to his congregation that two weeks earlier he learned “that a young woman had been sold by her father to be sent South—for what purpose you can imagine when you see her.” As Beecher enjoined his audience to contemplate the horrors to which “Sarah” would be subject, he informed them that the slave trader who bought Sarah for twelve hundred dollars “has offered you the opportunity of purchasing her freedom.”

At this point, Beecher invited Sarah up to the pulpit, “so that all may see you.” Thus, the largely white, pro-abolitionist congregation was presented with the opportunity to observe for themselves the actual body and plight of a young enslaved girl whose fate they might have a personal hand in alleviating. Yet, as I will explore further, Beecher’s invitation to his congregation that they “see” Sarah for themselves, as well as “bid” on her, illustrated what Saidiya Hartman has described as “the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics

Routledge
2011-11-10
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-68678-5

Edited by

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

In this collection, academics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze the confluence of a politician, a process, and a problem—Barack Obama, the 2008 US presidential election, and the ‘problem’ of race in contemporary America. The special focus falls upon Barack Obama himself, who appears in many guises: as an individual from biracial and transnational backgrounds; a skilled, urban African-American organizer and then politician; and as intellectual and author of a bestselling autobiographical exploration.

There is a certain representative quality about Obama that makes him a convenient way into the labyrinth of American race relations, national and regional politics (including the South and Hawaii), and past history (particularly from the 1960s to the present). Contributors also explore the role Michelle Obama has played in this process, both separately from and together with her husband, while one theme running through many chapters concerns the myriad ways that the American left, right and centre differ on the nature and future of race in a country that daily becomes more mixed in ethnic and racial terms. Race is everywhere; race is nowhere. The essays are grouped by their approach to the topic of Obama and race: via historical analysis, cultural studies, political science and sociology, as well as pedagogy. The result is an exciting mix of perspectives on one of the most fascinating phenomena of our time.
 
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice.

Contents

1. Obama and race: culture, history, politics Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
2. The riddle of race Emily Bernard, University of Vermont, USA
3. ‘A curious relationship’: Barack Obama, the 1960s and the election of 2008 Brian Ward, University of Manchester, UK
4. Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president George Lewis, University of Leicester, UK
5. Becoming black, becoming president Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
6. Two great days in Harlem Carmel King, freelance photographer, UK
7. How to read Michelle Obama Maria Lauret, Sussex University, UK
8. Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind Peter Kuryla, Belmont University, USA
9. Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawaii Jonathan Y. Okamura, University of Hawaii, USA
10. Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity Donald W. Beachler, Ithaca College, USA
11. Teaching Obama: history, critical race theory and social work education Damon Freeman, University of Pennsylvania, USA