Mixed Race Studies

God’s governor: George Grey and racial amalgamation in New Zealand 1845-1853

University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
August 2005
346 pages

Susannah Grant

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

The legend of Governor Grey is a major feature of nineteenth century New Zealand historiography. This thesis seeks to understand Grey as a real person. Acknowledging the past as a strange and foreign place, it argues that Grey (and previous interpretations of him) can only be understood in context. The intellectual milieu of liberal Anglicanism and Victorian structures of imperial authority are crucial to understanding Grey’s policies of racial amalgamation.

Focusing on Grey’s first governorship of New Zealand, 1845 – 1853, this thesis begins by exploring the imperial networks within which he operated. The members of Grey’s web gathered and shared information to further a range of different agendas – scientific, humanitarian, and political. Grey’s main focus was native civilisation. His ideas about race were informed by liberal Anglican theology, scientific investigation and personal experience. Grey believed in the unity and improvability of all mankind. His mission as governor was to elevate natives to a state of true equality with Europeans so that all could progress together still further up the scale of civilisation. This model formed the basis of Grey’s 1840 plan for civilising native peoples, in which he proposed a range of measures to promote racial amalgamation in Australia.

Between 1845 and 1853 Grey implemented those measures in New Zealand. He used military force and British law to establish peace and enforce Crown authority. He used economic policies to encourage Māori integration in the colonial economy. He built schools and hospitals and enacted legislation to encourage the best features of British culture and limit the effects of its worst. He also augmented his power and encouraged amalgamation through personal relationships, official reports and the structures of colonial authority.

Grey was driven by complex, sometimes contradictory motives including personal gain, economic imperatives and political pressures. His policies have had ongoing, often devastating effects, on Māori and on race relations in New Zealand. This thesis brings to light the ideas and attitudes which formed them. Grey understood himself as a Christian governor ordained to civilise Māori and join them with British settlers in accordance with God’s divine plan for improving humankind.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Beyond Black and White
• 1. Information and Improvement: an Imperial Web
• 2. Civilising Schemes: Ethnography and Empire
• 3. Law and War: the Politics of Humanitarian Control
• 4. Economic Integration: Land, Labour and Loans
• 5. Social Elevation: Education, Health and Culture
• 6. Personal Rule: Performing Authority
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

President Johnson’s Message

Staunton Spectator
Staunton Virginia
1867-12-10
Column 1

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

A full transcript of President Johnson’s recent address to both houses of Congress, in which he argues that the most pressing danger facing the nation is the attempt “to Africanize the half of our country.”.

President Andrew Johnson
Washington, December 3, 1867

The continued disorganization of the Union, to which the President has so often called the attention of Congress, is yet a subject of profound and patriotic concern.-We may, however,, find some relief from that anxiety in the reelection that the painful political situation, although before untried by ourselves, is not new in the experience of nations. Political science, perhaps as highly perfected in our own time and country as in any other, has not yet disclosed any means by which civil wars can be absolutely prevented. An enlightened nation, however, with a wise and beneficent Constitution of free government, may diminish their frequency and mitigate their severity by directing all its proceedings in accordance with its fundamental law.

When a civil war has been brought to a close, it is manifestly the first interest and duty of the State to repair the injuries which the war has inflicted, and to secure the benefit of the lessons it teaches as fully and as speedily as possible. This duty was, upon the termination of the rebellion, promptly accepted, both only by the Executive Department, but by the insurrectionary States themselves, and restoration, in the first moment of peace, was believed to be as easy and certain as it was indispensable. The expectations, however, then so reasonably and confidently entertained, were disappointed by legislation from which I felt constrained by my obligations to the Constitution, to withhold my assent.

It is therefore a source of profound regret that, in complying with the obligation imposed upon the President by the Constitution, to give the Congress from time to time information of the state of the Union, I am unable to communicate ahy definitive adjustment satisfactory to the American People, of the questions which, since the close of the rebellion, have agitated the public mind. On the contrary, candor compels me to declare that at this time there is no Union as our Fathers understood the term, and as they meant it to be understood by us. The Union which they established can exist only where all the States are represented in both Houses of Congress; where one State is as free as another to regulate its internal concerns according to its own will: and where the laws of the central Government, strictly confined to matters of national jurisdiction, apply with equal force to all the people of every section. That such is not the present “state of the Union” is a melancholy fact; and we all must acknowledge that the restoration of the States to their proper legal relations with the Federal Government and with one another according to the terms of the original compact, would be the greatest temporal blessing which God, in his kindest providence, could bestow upon this nation. It becomes our imperative duty to consider whether or not it is impossible to effect this most desirable consummation…
 
…The plan of putting the Southern States wholly, and the General Government partially, into the hands of negroes, is proposed at a time peculiarly unpropitious. The foundations of society have been broken up by civil war. Industry must be reorganized and justice re-established, public credit maintained, and order brought out of confusion. To accomplish these ends would require all the wisdom and virtue of the great men who formed our institutions originally. I confidently believe that their descendants will be equal to the arduous task before them, but it is worse than madness to expect that negroes will perform it for us. Certainly we ought not to ask their assistance until we despair of our competency.

The great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics will prevent an amalgamation or fusion of them together in one homogeneous mass. If the inferior obtains the ascendancy over the other, it will govern with reference, only to its own interests-for it will recognize no common interest-and create such a tyranny as this continent has never witnessed. Already the negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder. They are taught to regard as an enemy every white man who has any respect for the rights of his own race. If this continues, it must become worse and worse, until all order will be subverted, all industry cease, and the fertile fields of the South grow up into a wilderness. Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, non are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now making to Africanize the half of the country.

I would not put considerations of money in competition with justice and right. But the expenses incident to “reconstruction” under the system adopted by Congress aggravate what I regard as the intrinsic wrong of the measure itself. It has cost uncounted millions already, and if persisted in will add largely to the weight of taxation, already too oppressive to be borne without just complaint, and may finally reduce the Treasury of the nation to a condition of bankruptcy. We must not delude ourselves. It will require a strong standing army, and probably more than two hundred millions of dollars per annum, to maintain the supremacy of negro governments after they are established. The sum thus thrown away would, if properly used, form a sinking fund large enough to pay the whole national debt in less than fifteen years. It is vain to hope that negroes will maintain their ascendancy themselves. Without military power they are wholly incapable of holding in subjection the white people of the South…

Read the entire article here.

Black or biracial? Census forces a choice for some

Associated Press
2010-04-19

Jesse Washington, National Writer
Associated Press

There were 784,764 U.S. residents who described their race as white and black in the last census. But that number didn’t include Laura Martin, whose father is black and mother is white.

“I’ve always just checked black on my form,” said Martin, a 29-year-old university employee in Las Vegas. She grew up surrounded by black family and friends, listening to black music and active in black causes — “So I’m black.”

Nor did it include Steve Bumbaugh, a 43-year-old foundation director in Los Angeles, who also has a black father and white mother. “It’s not as if I’d have been able to drink out of the white and colored water fountains during Jim Crow,” he said. “And I most assuredly would have been a slave. As far as I’m concerned, that makes me black.”…

…It’s impossible to know how many of the 35 million people counted as “black alone” in 2000 have a white parent. But it’s clear that the decision to check one box — or more — on the census is often steeped in history, culture, pride and mentality.

Exhibit A is President Barack Obama. He declined to check the box for “white” on his census form, despite his mother’s well-known whiteness.

Obama offered no explanation, but Leila McDowell has an idea.

“Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then,” said McDowell, vice president of communications for the NAACP.

“Being black in this country is a political construct,” she said. “Even though my father is white and I have half his genes, when I apply for a loan, when I walk into the car lot, when I apply for a job, they don’t see me as half white, they see me as black. If you have any identifying characteristics, you’re black.”…

…But the logic is simple for Ryan Graham, the brown-skinned son of a white-black marriage who defines himself as multiracial.

“Say you’re wearing a black-and-white shirt. Somebody asks, ‘What color is your shirt?’ It’s black and white. There you go. People ask me, ‘What race are you?’ I say I’m black and white. It’s that simple,” said Graham, a 25-year-old sales consultant from Fort Lauderdale, Fla…

Read the entire article here.

Multiple Identification and Risks: Examination of Peer Factors Across Multiracial and Single-Race Youth

Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Volume 41, Number 7 (July 2012)
pages 847-862
DOI: 10.1007/s10964-012-9750-2

Yoonsun Choi
The School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Michael He
The School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Todd I. Herrenkohl
Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work
University of Washington, Seattle

Richard F. Catalano
Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work
University of Washington, Seattle

John W. Toumbourou
School of Psychology
Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia

Multiracial youth are thought to be more vulnerable to peer-related risk factors than are single-race youth. However, there have been surprisingly few well-designed studies on this topic. This study empirically investigated the extent to which multiracial youth are at higher risk for peer influenced problem behavior. Data are from a representative and longitudinal sample of youth from Washington State (N = 1,760, mean age = 14.13, 50.9% girls). Of those in the sample, 225 youth self-identified as multiracial (12.8%), 1,259 as White (71.5%), 152 as Latino (8.6%), and 124 as Asian American (7.1%). Results show that multiracial youth have higher rates of violence and alcohol use than Whites and more marijuana use than Asian Americans. Higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and single-parent family status partly explained the higher rates of problem behaviors among multiracial youth. Peer risk factors of substance-using or antisocial friends were higher for multiracial youth than Whites, even after socioeconomic variables were accounted for, demonstrating a higher rate of peer risks among multiracial youth. The number of substance-using friends was the most consistently significant correlate and predictor of problems and was highest among multiracial youth. However, interaction tests did not provide consistent evidence of a stronger influence of peer risks among multiracial youth. Findings underscore the importance of a differentiated understanding of vulnerability in order to better target prevention and intervention efforts as well as the need for further research that can help identify and explain the unique experiences and vulnerabilities of multiracial youth.

Read the entire article here.

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.

Oxford University Press
September 2012
224 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199812967; ISBN10: 0199812969
Paperback ISBN13: 9780199812981; ISBN10: 0199812985

H. Samy Alim, Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Anthropology and Linguistics
Stanford University

Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and African American and African Studies
Michigan State University

Forward by:

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking—as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, “Nah, we straight.”

In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama’s language use—and America’s response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President—from his use of Black Language and his “articulateness” to his “Race Speech,” the so-called “fist-bump,” and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.

Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that “race matters,” Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply “language matters” to the national conversation on race—and in our daily lives.

Features

• The first book-length analysis of Barack Obama’s rhetoric in relation to race
• Uses a sociolinguistic analysis of Barack Obama’s language and speeches to both reveal and challenge American ideas about language, race, education, and power
• A lively and engaging read from two renowned scholars of language, race, and education

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Showin Love
• 1. “Nah, We Straight”: Black Language and America’s First Black President
• 2. A.W.B. (Articulate While Black): Language and Racial Politics in the U.S.
• 3. Makin A Way Outta No Way: The Race Speech and Obama’s Rhetorical Remix
• 4. “The Fist Bump Heard ’round the World”: How Black Communication Becomes Controversial
• 5. “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue”: Hip Hop, Race, and the Culture Wars
• 6. Change the Game: Language, Education, and the Cruel Fallout of Racism
• Index

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.

University of Tennessee Press
2006-07-15
136 pages
9.2 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-462-2
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1572334625

Audrey Elisa Kerr, Professor of English and Women Studies
Southern Connecticut State University

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”

While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.

Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities.

The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Traditions and Complexion Lore
• 2. A National Perspective on Complextion Lore
• 3. Washington Society
• 4. Social Organization in Washington
• 5. School Lore: Beliefe and Practice in the Education of Black Washington
• 6. Complexion and Worship
• 7. One Drop of Black Blood, a Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

An Answer to Northen: The Son of a Slave Mother on Southern Miscegenation.

The Daily Star
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Volume 6, Number 2097
1899-06-19
page 1, column 1

THE ARITOCRACY RESPONSIBLE.

The Founder of the American Protective League Says the Poor Whites Are Not to Blame For Racial Amalgamation.

Boston, June 19.—Joseph W. Henderson, of Providence, founder of the American Protective League, an organization of colored people for the securing of their rights, delivered an address in the Spark Street church yesterday In which he replied to the recent speech of ex-Governor Northen, of Georgia, with reference to the southern outrages upon colored people. Said Mr. Henderson:

“It is not necessary at this time for me to make any reply to Governor Northen’s dramatic defense of human slavery. But had I been an owner of human beings and man-killing dogs, as he has been, and since written my name among the followers of Christ, I would have felt more like coming up to the altar of repentance at this stage of reform than to have come to one of the greatest cities In the world with a typewritten defense of the most cruel institutions of human debauchery ever known to civilized or savage man. Were it not that it was in Georgia that my poor mother was born; there that she tremblingly obeyed the slave master’s whip and felt the slave hound’s bite; there that she was sold and deported for life from her blood and kin, I would not stoop to dignify Governor Northen’s pro-slavery utterances even with a sneer.”

“Governor Northen says that miscegenation by law will never, take place in the south. But miscegenation in the south has already taken place. It has been on the road over 200 years. Not miscegenation by law, but by brute force, which is the very worst form of law. Who started it? Not the negroes, I am sure, nor was it the poor white trash. It was the blue vein aristocracy of the south that broke over the fence, defied all law, and the result is we have black negroes and white negroes, some of them as white as Governor Northen.”

“One seldom hears of the wholesale assaults that southern white men are making upon colored women, but they are as constant as the rising and setting of the sun. Go south and count the penitentiary-born children whose mothers are colored and fathers white. That tells the story.”

“Aside from force, there Is a regular organized society of white men and colored women, for which the colored women are as much to blame as the white men.  These particular colored women have long since concluded that they would rather wear diamonds and ride in carriages of their own than to chop cotton or wash dishes for somebody else, and be it said to the discredit of this class of colored women and their white gentlemen associates that they are living in clover.”

“The poor whites of the south are not to blame for this racial amalgamation, for they and the blacks do not associate. They mutually hate and scorn each other. It is the blue vein aristocracy of the south that in creating havoc with the morals and social affections in negro homes and mixing the races most alarmingly.”

“I have been unable to ascertain what led Governor Northen to tell his northern audience that the negro has the same chance In southern courts that the white man has. Southern law is the white man’s cloak and the black man’s enemy. It Is often used to protect the lawless and punish the lawful, provided the lawless are white and the lawful black.”

The White African American Body

Rutgers University Press
March 2002
240 pages
30 b&w illus.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3032-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3031-4

Charles D. Martin

Explores the image of the white Negro in American popular culture from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Blacks with white skin. Since colonial times, showmen have exhibited the bodies of African Americans with white or gradually whitening skin in taverns, dime museums, and circus sideshows. The term “white Negro” has served to describe an individual born with albinism as well as those who have vitiligo, a disorder that robs the skin of its pigment in ever-growing patches. In The White African American Body, Charles D. Martin examines the proliferation of the image of the white Negro in American popular culture, from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

This enigmatic figure highlights the folly of the belief in immutable racial differences. If skin is a race marker, what does it mean for blacks literally to be white? What does this say not only about blacks but also about whites? Scientists have probed this mystery, philosophers have pondered its meaning, and artists have profited from the sale of images of these puzzling figures.

Lavishly illustrated with many rarely seen photographs, The White African American Body shows how the white Negro occupied, and still occupies, the precarious position between white and black, and how this figure remains resilient in American culture.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Ballyhoo for the Exhibition
• The White Negro in the Early Republic
• Barnum’s Leopard Boy: The Reign of the Piebald Parliament
• The Double Bind of the Albino: “Less Nigger and More Nigger at the Same Time”
• A Better Skin: Scenes from the Exhibition
• White Negroes, Leopard Boys, and the King of Pop
• Afterword: Requiem for a Wigger
• Notes
• Index

Race, Marriage, and Law

The Harvard Crimson
1963-12-17

Peter Cumminos

American racism, though it rests most strongly upon social practice, is strongly bulwarked by many state and local laws. The segregated schools and transportation facilities of the South are explicitly decreed by state legislatures. Virginia courts maintain, for example, that “the preservation of racial integrity is the unquestioned policy of this State, and that it is sound and wholesome, cannot be gainsaid.”

The laws which most directly protect “racial integrity,” whatever that may be, are those which make miscegenation (intermarriage of races) a crime. The first anti-miscegenation law was enacted in the colony of Maryland in 1661. It declared that “divers free-born English women, forgetful of their free conditions, and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro slaves,” and to deter these “shameful matches” the law provided that women who so marry, and their off-spring, should themselves become slaves. Massachusetts became the third colony to prohibit marriage between Negroes and Caucasians in 1705.

Today it is illegal for Negroes and whites to marry in 21 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, [Indiana, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana], Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Six of these states prohibit Negro white marriages in their constitutions. Eighteen states, most of them in the last ten years, have repealed anti-miscegenation statutes: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington…

…Who’s Who

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.

Once a miscegenation case reaches the courts, legal definitions of race give way to more practical methods. Missouri courts, unable to test a man’s blood for his Negroness, have held that “the jury trying such a case may determine the proportion of negro blood in any party to such marriage from the appearance of such person.” In Alabama you are a Negro if witnesses testify that you attended a Negro school, go to Negro church, have Negro acquaintances, or are “otherwise voluntarily living on terms of social equality with them.” But in many states miscegenation suits have been lost because the white jurors simply could not decide whether the defendant was white or Negro…

Read the entire article here.

“Passing” in a White Genre: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Negotiations of the Plantation Tradition in “The Conjure Woman”

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910
Volume 27, Number 2 (Winter, 1995)
pages 20-36

Robert C. Nowatzki

When Charles Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman was published in 1899, the immensely popular plantation tradition in fiction had become heavily codified and limited the formal and thematic possibilities of any new texts produced in that tradition. Thus, in writing The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt was largely restricted by the conventions of the plantation tradition in fiction. Yet he also had some limited success in transforming and critiquing the ideologies and conventions which informed that tradition. This essay focuses on the relations between The Conjure Woman, the plantation tradition in fiction, and late nineteenth-century beliefs regarding racial difference and racial relations. More specifically, my analysis examines Chesnutt’s use of the frame narrative device common in plantation fiction, as well as his depiction of the black storyteller, the contrast between his black storyteller and his white narrator, and his depictions of slavery. By analyzing these features of The Conjure Woman in the context of plantation fiction conventions and the predominant racial ideologies of the time, we can see how Chesnutt’s writing was determined by these ideologies and conventions, and conversely, how he was able to critique them.

The Conjure Woman and Its Predecessors

The Conjure Woman consists of seven stories: “The GoopheredGrapevine,” “Po’ Sandy,” “Mars Jeem’s Nightmare,” “The Conjurer’s…