Mixed Race Studies

Mississippi Black Code (1865)

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After The Civil War
Digital History: using new technologies to enhance teaching and research
2011

The Civil Rights of Freedmen in Mississippi (Approved November 25, 1865)

Section 1. Be it enacted by the legislature of the State of Mississippi, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this state, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, any may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated town or cities in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same.

Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may intermarry with each other, in the same manner and under the same regulations that are provided by law for white persons: Provided, that the clerk of probate shall keep separate records of the same.

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes, who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes. That it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony and, on conviction thereof, shall be confined in the state penitentiary for life; and those shall be deemed freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes who are of pure Negro blood, and those descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person…

Read the entire code here.

Dawn of the Different: The Mulatto Zombie in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead

The Journal of Popular Culture
Volume 45, Issue 3 (June 2012)
pages 551–571
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2012.00944.x

Justin Ponder

WHILE ZOMBIE FILMS DO NOT BLATANTLY FOCUS ON miscegenation or mulattos, interracial themes abound in them. In George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Ben, a black man, saves Barbra, a white woman, from hordes of zombies. From this moment on, the film binds this interracial couple, casting them as partners attempting to survive the horrific attacks of the living dead. Cristina Isabel Pinedo (Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Vieiwng) claims that “racial silence” is the film’s “structuring absence,” and this absence falls no more silent than the romance this interracial coupling implies (29). The film pairs the cantankerous and controlling Mr. Cooper with the long-suffering and submissive Mrs. Cooper while coupling the young, star-crossed lovers Tom and Judy. According to North American cinematic logic, one could safely assume that Ben and Barbra, the remaining adults, would fall in love by film’s end. While the late 60s might have been ready to see a black man save, protect, and even punch a white woman, the era apparently was not prepared to see him walk away hand-in-hand with her as innumerable zombies rise from the dead to keep Night’s black white couple from the normative romantic conclusion of North American cinema.

This romantic tension between black man and white woman continues in Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead. The film focuses on four survivors: Fran, a resourceful news producer; Steve, a helicopter pilot and Fran’s lover; Roger, a S.W.A.T. team member; and Peter, a S.W.A.T. team member and the quartet’s only black man. Robin Wood (“Normality and Monsters: The Films of Larry Cohen and…

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An Imperative Duty

Broadview Press
March 2010 (Originally Published in 1891)
200 pages
ISBN: 9781551119144 / 1551119145

W. D. Howells (William Dean Howells) (1837-1920)

Edited by:

Paul R. Petrie, Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• W.D. Howells: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• An Imperative Duty
• Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews and Responses
• Appendix B: The “Tragic Mulatta” in Literature
  1. From Grace King, “The Little Convent Girl” (1893)
  2. From Matt Crim, “Was It An Exceptional Case?” (1891)
  3. W.D. Howells, “The Pilot’s Story” (1860)
• Appendix C: Interracial Marriage & the “Science” of Race
  1. From Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853)
  2. From J.C. Nott, Types of Mankind (1854)
  3. From Frederick L. Hoffman, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)
  4. Pace v. State of Alabama, 1883
  5. From Henry W. Grady, “In Plain Black and White” (1885)
  6. From Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American” (1900)
  7. From W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)
• Appendix D: W.D. Howells’s Theory of Realism—The “Editor’s Study” Columns
  1. May 1886 [Realism and Romance]
  2. November 1886 [Aesthetics and Ethics]
  3. April 1887 [Art, Truth, and Morality]
  4. September 1887 [Realism and Democracy]
  5. Dec 1887 [The Real and the Ideal Grasshopper]
  6. March 1888 [Can Fiction Help the People It Depicts?]
  7. December 1888 [Christmas Literature]
• Select Bibliography

Read the entire novel here.

Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities

Law & Society Review
Volume 41, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 587–618
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2007.00315.x

Deenesh Sohoni, Associate Professor of Sociology
The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

In this article, I use state-level anti-miscegenation legislation to examine how Asian ethnic groups became categorized within the American racial system in the period between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I show how the labels used to describe Asian ethnic groups at the state level reflected and were constrained by national-level debates regarding the groups eligible for U.S. citizenship. My main point is that Asian ethnic groups originally were viewed as legally distinct—racially and ethnically, and that members of these groups recognized and used these distinctions to seek social rights and privileges. The construction of “Asian” as a social category resulted primarily from congressional legislation and judicial rulings that linked immigration with naturalization regulations. Anti-miscegenation laws further contributed to the social exclusion of those of Asian ancestry by grouping together U.S.-born and foreign-born Asians.

Read or purchase the article here.

How Jews Became White Folks and What That says about Race in America

Rutgers University Press
1998-10-01
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2589-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2590-7

Karen Brodkin, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles

A wide-ranging and provocative assessment of how race, class, and gender shape social identity in the United States.

We fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create “Americans.” Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family’s multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.

Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country’s racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien “others” have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles-is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. How Did Jews Become White Folks?
• 2. Race Making
• 3. Race, Gender, and Virtue in Civic Discourse
• 4. Not Quite White: Gender and Jewish Identity
• 5. A Whiteness of Our Own? Jewishness and Whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index