Mixed Race Studies

“Faithfully Drawn from Real Life”: Autobiographical Elements in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 137, Number 3 (July 2013)
pages 261-300
DOI: 10.5215/pennmaghistbio.137.3.0261

Mary Maillard

A resurgence of interest in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends—the second novel by an African American and the first to portray northern racism—underscores the need for consideration of recently discovered biographical information about this enigmatic author. Previously unknown details about the lives of Frank J. Webb (1828-94) and his family and friends parallel some of his literary portrayals, subtly inform other scenes and characters, and generally help to illuminate the unique combination of biography, social history, and creative imagination that constitute Webb’s complex literary achievement.

The Garies and Their Friends is constructed around two major narrative lines: the stories of the Garie family and the Ellis family. In Georgia, Clarence Garie, a white slave owner, is living openly with his mulatto slave mistress, Emily Winston; he treats her with as much affection and respect as if she were his wife and wishes to marry her, but interracial marriage is illegal in the state. They have two children, named after their parents, Clarence and Emily. The Garies entertain Emily’s cousin, George Winston, who, although born and raised in slavery, was educated and freed by a kind master. Now, with all the appearances of a refined gentleman, he is passing as white—much to the approbation and amusement of Mr. Garie.

In Philadelphia, the Ellises are a “highly respectable and industrious coloured family.” Mr. Ellis, a carpenter, and his wife, Ellen, have three…

Read or purchase the article here.

Scholar Saw a Multicolored American Culture

The New York Times
2013-08-19

Mel Watkins

Albert Murray Dies at 97; Fought Black Separatism

Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in postwar America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and the prospects for equality in a society with a history of racism.

 As blacks and whites clashed in the streets, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, along with writers and artists including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks who believed that they could never achieve true equality in the United States.

 Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the country. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and American Indian traditions and helping to give the nation’s culture its very shape and sound…

…Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Art at Wing Luke Museum explores mixed-race heritage

The Seattle Times
2013-08-19

Robert Ayers, Special to The Seattle Times

The thought-provoking “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian-American Art” exhibition is showing at the Wing Luke in Seattle through Jan. 19, 2014.

“War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian-American Art,” currently at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, is a jewel of an exhibition that has been organized and curated by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis.

As their provocative title suggests, the curators — both scholars in the field of mixed-race studies — see their role not only to present a group of stimulating high-quality works (which they have done anyway,) but also to encourage a new understanding of what “mixed race” means. The last thing they intend is a celebration of multiculturalism, and instead, they stress that there is nothing new or exceptional about mixed-race heritage. These are issues that are more than political for them, and for the artists they have included in the show, because they are part of the fabric of their own experience…

Read the entire article here.

Sex and Race, Volume I: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands: The Old World

J. A. Rogers (1880-1966)

Helga Rogers
1941 (Ninth Edition, 1967)
302 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0960229406; ISBN 10: 096022940X

Table of Contents

• I. RACE TODAY
• II. WHICH IS THE OLDEST RACE?
• III. THE MIXING OF BLACK AND WHITE IN THE ANCIENT EAST
• IV. BLACK AND WHITE IN SYRIA, PALESTINE, ARABIA, PERSIA
• V. WHO WERE THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF INDIA?
• VI. WHO WERE THE FIRST CHINESE?
• VII. THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT GREECE
• VIII. NEGROES IN ANCIENT ROME AND CARTHAGE
• IX. WERE THE JEWS ORIGINALLY NEGROES?
• X. RACE-MIXING UNDER ISLAM
• XI. RACE-MIXING UNDER ISLAM (Cont’d)
• XII. MIXING OF WHITE AND BLACK IN AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA
• XIII. MISCEGENATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
• XIV. RACE-MIXING IN AFRICA AND ASIA TODAY
• XV. MISCEGENATION IN SPAIN. PORTUGAL, AND ITALY
• XVI. MISCEGENATION IN HOLLAND, BELGIUM, AUSTRIA, POLAND, RUSSIA
• XVII. NEGRO-WHITE MIXING IN GERMANY, ANCIENT AND MODERN
• XVIII. THE MIXING OF WHITES AND BLACKS IN THE BRITISH ISLES
• XIX. MISCEGENATION IN FRANCE
• XX. ISABEAU, BLACK VENUS OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XV
• XXI. THE BLACK NUN–MULATTO DAUGHTER OF MARIA THERESA, QUEEN OF FRANCE
• XXII. BAUDELAIRE AND JEANNE DUVAL
• APPENDICES
  • Race-mixing in European Literature
  • Did the Negro Originate in Africa or Asia?
  • Black Gods and Messiahs
  • History of the Black Madonnas
  • Notes and References to the Negro under Islam
  • List of the Illustrations and Notes on Them

Chapter One: RACE TODAY

“A Charm of Powerful Trouble”

The conception of races once so innocent,” said Jean Finot, “has cast a veil of tragedy over the earth. From without it shows us humanity divided into unequal fractions… From within this same falsely conceived science of races likewise encourages hatred and discord among the children of the same common country . . . People against people, race against race . . . persecution and extermination on every hand.”

One writer has called it a Frankenstein monster. But that comparison is far too feeble. However, it has this point of resemblance: Frankenstein’s monster was built of scraps—scraps of corpses, a hand from this one, an eye from that, a patch of skin from this other. The evil genie of race it also created from scraps—scraps of false philosophies of past centuries; a quotation from this or that prejudiced traveller; lines from this and that semi-ignorant divine of colonial days; excerpts from Gobineau, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the Bible; passages from this or that badly mixed-up ethnologist, all jumbled together with catch-phrases from greedy plantation owners, slave-dealers, and other traffickers in human flesh.

The purpose was to create a “pure” race, a “superior” race, a race that like the philosopher’s stone of the ancients, excelled all excellence—a race so meritorious that it had the right to enslave and use the rest of humanity.

Every newly discovered bit of anthropology was twisted into building this doctrine of a “superior” race. A Putnam Weale worked most industriously on this part of it; a Tom Dixon, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard on that; a William McDougall and a Frederick Hoffman busied themselves with that other, while a host of Southern politicians and other lesser fry assisted…

…As for the mixed-blood, he ought never to have been. No amount of Christianity or religious training, we are informed, will give him good heredity, and this as late as 1935 by no less an authority than the learned Victoria Society of London, England. In short, the mixed-blood is a creation of Satan. “God made the white man and God made the black man” said Colonial America, “but the Devil made the mulatto.”

The white race flowed from “a pure source”: Europe. Miscegenation with blacks there was unknown throughout the ages, we are told. “It was not until the discovery of the New World that the races of men strikingly different in appearance came to intermix,” says Crawfurd. Before that, he says, inferior races did mix with superior races, but both were white.

Nothing, however, is further from the truth. We shall show in these pages that sex relations between so-called whites and blacks go back to prehistoric times and on all the continents. Furthermore, since it is held by many that it is only the mixing of the black man and the white woman that can affect the “purity of the race” that it is precisely this kind that happened most in Europe…

Read the entire book here.

“I’m quite interested in thinking about that notion of the hyphen. That little thing that’s in-between. Let’s say, “Chinese-Canadian,” or “Japanese-Canadian.” I like to challenge those two poles, those two hegemonous poles who want to claim a part of me. Because I feel like I’ve lived in-between and I like the in-between.  It’s a place that I would like to spruce-up a bit. I like to, you know, put some nice furniture in the in-between place.” —Fred Wah

Anne Marie Nakagawa, “Between: Living in the Hyphen,” National Film Board of Canada, (2005): 00:0:28-00:01:02.

‘Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful’

Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting
The New York Times
2013-08-19

Nicole Soojung Callahan

Like many other people of color, I am no stranger to awkward conversations about race. Strangers have complimented my English, remarked on how tall I am “for an Asian” and — more times than I can count — asked where I am really from. Since becoming a parent five years ago, I’ve had to learn to field a whole new set of questions and comments regarding my multiracial children.

“Korean, Irish and Lebanese is such a unique combination,” a friend exclaimed after my eldest daughter was born. “She’s like a poster baby for the U.N.!”

Several people in our diverse suburb of the District of Columbia have asked if I am my daughters’ baby sitter, presumably because they cannot spot the resemblance between us. At a party last year, a white woman asked if I was surprised when my children were born: “Did you expect them to look, you know, less white?” (No, I was pretty sure who their father was, so I wasn’t really shocked.)

Another person wanted to know if I thought the girls’ “coloring” would stay the same or “get darker” over time. Then there was the mother at the park who looked at my girls on the swing set and said bluntly: “What are they, exactly?”

The girls have even received compliments for not looking fully Korean. “Your daughter is so pretty,” a Chinese friend said to me last month. “Have you thought about having her model?”

“No,” I replied (possibly the truest thing I have ever said)…

Read the entire article here.

A Family Tree That Includes Slaves — And Slave Owners

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2013-08-15

Celeste Headlee, Host

Part of our summer reading series Island Reads, highlighting authors from the Caribbean

Andrea Stuart was curious about her family’s history in Barbados. And through years of careful research, she found that her bloodline includes both slave owners and slaves. She has written about her own family, as well as a detailed history of slavery in the Caribbean, in her book Sugar in the Blood. Guest host Celeste Headlee talks with Stuart about her family history, the moral complexity of slavery and finding roots in the past.

Interview Highlights

On the founder of a mixed-race dynasty:

“When I read about George Ashby, or rather, wrote about him, I remember thinking, ‘My goodness. What bravery it must have taken to take this huge step to leave England, in his case, to go to the New World.’ I mean, in those days the journey itself was so traumatic and long, the chances of being killed by raiders or pirates — everything was so difficult about this journey, and then to kind of confront this untrampled land, where at least half of the early settlers died just because things were so difficult. It seemed to me that he was extraordinarily brave. But then his generation and the subsequent generations make this terrible mistake. They become slave owners, and therefore become part of the whole institution of slavery. So I am deeply ambivalent about him. I admire him on one hand, and I lament him on the other.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

There Is No Scientific Rationale for Race-Based Research

Journal of the National Medical Association
Volume 99, Number 6 (June 2007)
pages 690-692

Eddie L. Hoover, Professor of Surgery
State University of New York, Buffalo

For centuries, the colonial governments used a combination of race and ethnic characteristics to subjugate and control people of color, and scientists of the day provided evidence of the “natural order of things” to support national policies of domination, segregation and control. There have been many examples of events in the past 70 years to suggest that achievements by ethnic peoples are not genetically determined and that race and ethnicity are merely terms to describe external features, language, culture, social mores and folklore. BiDil was the first drug in this country approved by the FDA for use in a single “race” after a clinical trial that enrolled only members of that race. Thus arose the question of the efficacy of doing race-based research in humans. In order for this kind of research to have any scientific basis, each individually defined or self-declared race would have to have a 100% pure gene pool, and the data show that the gene pool among whites, blacks and Hispanics in America is very heterogeneous. This makes for far greater similarities among U.S. citizens than any perceived differences, and genomic science has failed to support the concept of racial categories in medicine.Scientists involved with the first mapping of the human genome have noted that there is no basis in the genetic code for race. That being the case, there appears to be no justification for race-based research among human beings.

Although the United States has experienced enormous improvements in its healthcare system over the past half-century, there are still widening disparities in most disease processes between whites and blacks/Hispanics.’ There has been much debate as to how these disparities can be eliminated, but simple, logical programs that could be tailored to specific minority communities in different geographical locations have not proven to be practical for a variety of reasons. To be sure, disparities in healthcare, like anything else, are a function of a variety of factors, including education, environment, income and culture, among others. Race and ethnicity are important determinants of some of these functions, thus raising the question as to whether these parameters may, in fact, be determinants of outcome in some of these disease processes based upon genetics as well as the aforementioned risk factors.

Modern-day science has amassed enough evidence to suggest that there is very little biological difference between the various races. In order for race-based research to have any scientific basis, each individually defined or self-declared race would have to have a 100% pure and homogeneous gene pool. Some racial and ethnic groups have a very heterogeneous gene pool, such as whites and Hispanics. The same scientific data show that approximately 80% of American blacks have some degree of white ancestry, and although not so nearly well publicized is the fact that many whites also have black and Hispanic ancestry. This would make for far greater similarities in the U.S. black/white gene pool than any perceived differences, and genomic science has failed to support the concept of racial categories in medicine and further purports that there is more genetic diversity within a “racial cohort” than any differences between two such cohorts.” Craig Venter, who helped produce the first map of the human genome, noted that there is no basis in the genetic code for race.’ That being the case, race then becomes rather meaningless in scientific research. This would obviously include race-based pharmaceutical research that resulted in the drug BiDil. This is not to be confused with the fact that race indeed affects both access and outcomes in our healthcare system, as it most certainly does. Even black medical professionals do not enjoy the same access to highly specialized services as their white counterparts, such as coronary artery bypass grafting, but the basis is not biological and by extension, not genetically determined…

Read the entire article here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present by Sara Salih (review)

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 2013
pages 777-780
DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2013.0025

Nicole N. Aljoe, Assistant Professor of English
Northeastern University

Sarah Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (London, New York: Routledge, 2010)

Sara Salih offers a welcome and rigorous analysis of the relationships among the development of the law, notions of subjectivity, and discourses of race and sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Jamaica. This book makes a productive contribution to ongoing critical conversations about the complexity and nuance of race in the British past by responding explicitly to David Scott’s suggestion that we consider more carefully the stories we assume we know, particularly about slavery. One such story concerns the mulatto and his/her tragic outsiderness as exemplified in the trope of “tragic mulatto.” Numerous scholars, including Werner Sollors and Eve Raimon, have explored this trope within the context of the United States, and Salih’s study builds on this work and extends it by considering representations of mixed-race individuals in the British-Jamaican context. In addition, by making clear the different ways in which the mulatto was treated and represented outside of the US context—for example, noting that neither interracial sex nor marriage were ever outlawed in Jamaica or England, unlike in the United States—Salih’s study offers a corrective to uncritical conflation of the distinct cultures of enslavement. Most specifically, her study reveals the ways in which, in the British-West Indian context, although mulattos were frequently figured as being inside particular aspects of national and subject-constituting discourses—mulattos could “pass” for white, and in the eighteenth century they could legally petition to be designated as white—they were simultaneously and persistently represented as isolated and “firmly outside the heterorepronormative narrative paradigm” (125).

This book is invested in illustrating the “processes of normalization and the consolidation of norms” about the legal status, nature, and character of mixed race individuals in Jamaica and England from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century by considering cultural representations alongside juridical and colonial documents. Salih argues that all of these texts—the fiction, nonfiction, legal writings, and judicial statutes—contribute dialogically to creating and sustaining societal norms and subjects. The study traces the ways in which these texts inform the legal identity “mulatto” that eventually comes to be defined and understood as a cultural/political identity. In tracing this movement, she is “less interested in ‘race’ as interiority and affect than in the specific ways in which it is produced and enacted legally and performatively” (123–24). And although the study scrupulously sets itself against those studies of race in the eighteenth century that deal with questions and issues of identity, it is best seen as a complement to these other studies. In particular, by attending to the ways in which discussions of the mulatto were also discussions of interracial sex, Salih illuminates the impact of sexuality on notions of race.

Salih begins her close readings with Marly, an 1828 novel about a Jamaican slave plantation. After providing an intriguing reading of the relationship between fiction, the law, and power grounded in the novel’s initial image of a slave driver exchanging his whip for a pen (56), Salih outlines how the novel, by offering fiction as well as history in its description of life on the plantation, contributes to the creation of societal norms. In so doing, according to Salih, novels can reveal “narrative investment in the disciplining of subjects” (57). For example, society wants mixedrace women to disappear, and hence they are novelistically relegated to the background. However, the novel Marly also reveals the complicated positioning of mixed-race individuals. Although women are relegated to the background, a mixed-race man is foregrounded in a chapter in which he offers a long harangue on how similar brown or mixed-race people are to whites and therefore should be allowed more freedoms in Jamaica (68–70). Although the brown man gets to proclaim his proximity to whiteness, at the end of the novel he too is isolated like the brown women, Salih argues, and is placed in a non-reproductive category.

The study then moves to a reading of The Woman of Colour (1808), edited by Lyndon Dominique for Broadview Press (2007). Salih addresses how in the novel, despite a positive representation of Olivia (its interracial character), she too is isolated and unmarried…

When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain

I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
1987
300 pages
220 x 140cm
Hardback ISBN: 9781850430391

Graham Smith

An important chapter in the history of World War II is here explored for the first-time—how the arrival of the black troops strained war-time Anglo-American relations, upset elements of the British political and military establishments and brought Britons face to face with social and sexual issues they had never faced before. This book, drawing on previously unpublished new material, covers an important but neglected dimension of diplomatic relations in World War II. As well as providing critical insights into the thinking of many leading political and military figures of the period, it paints an original and invaluable portrait of wartime Britain and its confrontation with the issue of race. It is a tale rich in human dignity—and in instances of tragicomic hypocrisy.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Prologue: The Great War – Black Americans in Europe
• 2. The Early War Years: First Encounters
• 3. Attitudes and Anxieties: Jim Crow and the British Government
• 4. Jim Crow in Britain: The US Army and Racial Segregation
• 5. Novelty to Familiarity: The Home Front
• 6. Dixie Invades Britain: The Racial Violence
• 7. The Watchdogs: Jim Crow Under Close Scrutiny
• 8. ‘No Mother, No Father, No Uncle Sam’: Sex and Brown Babies
• 9. The Black GI in Britain: Reflections and Results
• Notes
• A Select Bibliography
• Index