Mixed Race Studies

“The newspapers recently reported that the private secretary to Mr. Blount of Georgia, representing the United States in the Hawaiian Islands, would shortly marry the daughter of a rich Chinaman of Honolulu. This educated young gentleman and of social standing seeks an alliance with an ex-coolie—a pig eyed pagan. Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race? The negro maidens are seen at certain colleges for women of high degree in the North. Whereunto will this grow?”

“Southern Race Question,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, (July 25, 1893), page 2, column 5.

The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People

University of Nebraska Press
2001 (Originally published in 1980)
298 pages
Illus., maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6197-6

Karen I. Blu, Emeritus Associate Professor of Anthropology
New York University

How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly “Indian” customs come to be accepted—socially and legally—as Indians? Originally published in 1980, The Lumbee Problem traces the political and legal history of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, arguing that Lumbee political activities have been powerfully affected by the interplay between their own and others’ conceptions of who they are. The book offers insights into the workings of racial ideology and practice in both the past and the present South—and particularly into the nature of Indianness as it is widely experienced among non-reservation Southeastern Indians. Race and ethnicity, as concepts and as elements guiding action, are seen to be at the heart of the matter. By exploring these issues and their implications as they are worked out in the United States, Blu brings much-needed clarity to the question of how such concepts are—or should be—applied across real and perceived cultural borders.

Tom Christian, Descendant of Bounty Mutineer, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Margalit Fox

Tom Christian, known as the Voice of Pitcairn for his half-century-long role in keeping his tiny South Pacific island, famed as the refuge of the Bounty mutineers, connected to the world, died at his home there on July 7. Mr. Christian, Pitcairn’s chief radio officer and a great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny’s leader, was 77.

With his death, Pitcairn’s permanent population stands at 51.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his daughter Jacqueline Christian said.

Though Mr. Christian was the world’s best-known contemporary Pitcairner, word of his death — reported in the July issue of The Pitcairn Miscellany, the island’s monthly newsletter — reached a broad audience only this week, when it appeared in newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

“It takes awhile for news to get out,” Ms. Christian said by telephone from Pitcairn on Thursday…

…Britain’s only remaining territory in the Pacific, the Pitcairn archipelago lies roughly equidistant between Peru and New Zealand, about 3,300 miles from each. It comprises four small islands: Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. Only Pitcairn Island, named for the sailor who sighted it from a British ship in 1767, is inhabited.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them…

…Though Pitcairn today has some trappings of 21st-century technology — electricity 14 hours a day and a country code, .pn, on the Internet — it still maintains a striking degree of isolation. The island has no airstrip: it can be reached by flying to Tahiti and taking a once-a-week plane from there to Mangareva Island, in the Gambier Islands, followed by a two- to three-day sea voyage.

There are no automobiles on Pitcairn, and the island’s rocks and cliffs bear names redolent of long-ago tragedies: “Where Dan Fall,” “Where Minnie Off,” “Oh Dear.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Haji, an Actress Featured in Cult Films by Russ Meyer, Dies at 67

The New York Times
2013-08-17

Daniel E. Slotnik

Haji [Barbarella Catton], a voluptuous actress who played one of three homicidal go-go dancers in Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” died on Aug. 9 in Southern California. She was 67.

Her death was confirmed by the dancer and actress Kitten Natividad, a friend, who said she did not know the cause. She said Haji had high blood pressure and heart problems in recent years and was taken to a hospital after falling ill at a restaurant in Newport Beach.

Haji, a brunette of Filipino and British descent, met Meyer, the celebrated B-movie director, in the mid-1960s while she worked in a strip club in California. He cast her as the lead in his biker movie “Motorpsycho” (1965) even though she had no acting experience…

Read the entire obituary here.

Southern Race Question

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tuesday, 1893-07-25
page 2, column 5
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection
Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

The Views Expressed in a Richmond Religious Newspaper

How the Negro Is Taking Advantage of the Opportunities for Advancement—Some Singular Ideas as to the Future Outcome of Present Developments — Another Talker Suggests a Colored State.

Richmond, Va., July 25—A startling editorial appeared in the last issue of the Richmond Christian Advocate, the leading Methodist organ In the South, on the negro question, Written by Dr. J. J. Lafferty. Among other things it said:

“A Southern Methodist advocate has this incident: In a village of the cotton belt a big, burly blackr ode up to a store and said to the owner: ‘Let this man (pointing to a poor white laborer) have two dollars’ worth of goods and charge it to me.’ This transaction may fret the reader, but it has a wide significance.”

“The Northern people, during the war, were drawn to the plantation peasantry of the South. The lot of fat and fun loving negro, the happiest working class on earth, was, for years, pictured as a bitter bondage, the slave was represented as longing for freedom, and during the war praying through the nights for the coming of the national troops. Those moving though mistaken fancies and much more of the same sort, stirred the philanthropic heart of the cotton thread millionaires, and the rich army contractors turned virtuous. A great sum was sent South for the education of the negro. It expenditure. In the main, helped the negro. It was wisely directed that these donations should have a practical turn. What was the outcome? We find in nearly every Southern state the negro boys of the brighter sort in training schools.”

“In the meanwhile, the negro reported in the census is growing rapidly as a citizen, with a home and decent income, a thrifty member of society. Moreover, the Southern commonwealth began after the war to tax the white property holders heavily to educate the sons of the non tax paying negro.”

“The negro laborer received as much money for coarse work as the ex-soldier of Lee. The white man consumed more of his earnings in house rent, clothing and food, hence he could not spare his son at the school. He needed the boy at the plow to aid in bringing up the family. The negro boy first loomed in the free school to read and write, then he learned in these technical schools how to make fine shoes, buggies, saddles, etc.”

“The newspapers recently reported that the private secretary to Mr. Blount of Georgia, representing the United States in the Hawaiian Islands, would shortly marry the daughter of a rich Chinaman of Honolulu. This educated young gentleman and of social standing seeks an alliance with an ex-coolie—a pig eyed pagan. Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race? The negro maidens are seen at certain colleges for women of high degree in the North. Whereunto will this grow?”

“Consider the future of the friendless and fatherless boy of the white race in the South. Can he pay $500 to attend the Stevens Institute in New York. Can he command money for board and raiment while a student at any state school with a small annex of tools and a shop? He hasn’t money enough to buy oven a railroad ticket to such a college.”

“The grandchildren of warlike men with historic names, who made the Southern army a synonym of dauntless courage, are drifting toward the helot class, and in the century dawning there will come to pass social conditions that would stir the corpses in the jackets of grey.

“No man has soon the harvest from the sowing after Appomattox. The statesmen among us robbed the ex-soldier of Lee to educate black competitors of his children. Then Northern millionaires, in hatred of the paroled citizens, have endowed colleges of tools and machines to equip the ex-slave to surpass and subjugate the sons of the confederate in the struggle for the best pay and position in the skilled trades. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us. Thoughtful men do not contest the fact.”

Madison, Wis., July 25—At the Monona lake assembly yesterday, John Temple Graves of Georgia advanced some radical ideas regarding the negro race problem in his lecture entitled, “Uncle Tom’s’ New Cabin.” He said:

“The remedy Is to be found in a negro state planted in the heart of our own great republic, under the shadow of the flag, under the benediction of the government. Here let him, unmolested, work out his final destiny. In the region of Colorado, Now Mexico and Arizona is to be found on area of 150,000,000 acres upon which our whole negro population could find subsistence and yet not be so densely populated as I found Germany or Belgium. The government should lend them every aid in developing the country. Negroes alone should hold the offices and rule the country. Nor are they opposed to such action. Actual investigation has shown that numbers are ready to go even to Africa where they can have a state of their own.”

Wilder than her pet cheetah, the sex-mad Black Venus who outwitted the Nazis: Remarkable story of Josephine Baker as Rihanna is set to play legendary seductress in biopic

The Daily Mail
2013-08-22

Annabel Venning

Under scorching stage-lights, Josephine Baker stepped out in front of the audience entirely naked, but for a few strategically-placed flamingo-feathers.

Her male dance partner carried her upside down, her long, slender legs stretched out in the splits.

He set her down, and she began to dance. As the light played on her coffee-brown skin, her body seemed to become almost molten as she wound herself around her partner.

She was, she later recalled, lost in the eroticism of the moment, ‘intoxicated . . . driven by dark forces I didn’t recognise,’ as she writhed seductively before shuddering to a climactic halt.

For a few moments the Paris audience remained silent, as if stunned. Then they rose to their feet as one and erupted in ecstatic applause.

She was hailed as the ‘Black Venus’. Picasso dubbed her the ‘Nefertiti of now’. Author Ernest Hemingway called her ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’.

It was the start of an extraordinary career.  Josephine Baker, the girl from the St Louis ghetto, rose to become one of the greatest divas ever, an icon of the Jazz Age, talented and glamorous, but also decadent and amoral.

Today, all that many people remember of her is that she danced naked except for her famous tutu made of (fake) bananas…

Read the entire article here.

Whites think race equality is nearer than blacks do, study finds

The Los Angeles Times
2013-08-22

Emily Alpert

Nearly half a century after Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream that someday people would be judged not by their race but by their character, whites think a colorblind society is much closer to reality than blacks, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

The findings underscore the enduring chasm between the way white and black Americans perceive racism and its continued effects, as glaring gaps in wealth and education persist between the races…

…Whites are more likely to believe that racial equality is within reach because “the hideous things that have happened in our history — lynchings, cross burnings, the Ku Klux Klan marching people out of town — those things have tended to disappear,” said Jerome Rabow, professor emeritus of sociology at UCLA. Whites also point to laws against discrimination, he said.

But “when blacks talk about how they’re doing, it’s more about their daily lives,” Rabow said. Whites often miss the daily frustrations that blacks encounter, such as frequently being pulled over by police, or professors assuming they’re meeting with them because they did poorly on an exam, Rabow added…

…Large majorities of black and white respondents said they believed that their two groups got along well, Pew found. Yet Pew discovered that for both whites and blacks, the feeling of racial progress that followed the election of Barack Obama seems to have faded.

After Obama became president, higher shares of both groups of respondents said blacks were doing better than they were five years earlier. Since then, the numbers have dropped closer to previous levels, back down to 35% of whites and 26% of blacks, the Pew survey showed.

“That Obama effect is quickly dissipating,” said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology at Duke University. “Having a black president doesn’t mean much for us in daily life.”…

Read the entire article here.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction [Fruscione review]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 3 (September 2013)
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt040

Joseph Fruscione, Adjunct Professor of Writing
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 336 pages.

Between the Civil War (1861-65) and World War I (1914-18), writes Diana Rebekkah Paulin in Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction, “Americans … literally could not stop writing about—and talking about, and enacting—the union between black and white” in fiction and theater. Paulin asserts that such literary and dramatic works telescope how “racialized citizenship and national identity formation … coalesced” in this period (x). Positioning Imperfect Unions within evolving critical conversations about writing, race, and nation, Paulin outlines her book’s central focus and questions in the introduction:

Rather than remaining hidden, this great American fear [of black-white unions] was actually paraded and spectacularized in public sites. Rather than being relegated to the realm of the invisible, black-white relations were continually staged. Why, so to speak, all the drama? Why the consistent production—and from available historical evidence, the eager consumption by the masses—of something that deeply unsettled so many Americans? (xii)

Paulin explores and complicates these questions by analyzing works by Dion Boucicault (The Octoroon, 1859), Louisa May Alcott (“M. L.” and “My Contraband,” 1863), Bartley Campbell (The White Slave, 1882), William Dean Howells (An Imperative Duty)…

Read or purchase the review here.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin (Green-Rogers review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 65, Number 2, May 2013
pages 304-306
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0048

Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Post Doctorate Fellow
University of Utah

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Paulin is a multidisciplinary examination of how fictionalized versions of miscegenation both obfuscated and unmasked aspects of the complex black/white binary that shaped racial histories in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By combining literary and historical approaches from the fields of theatre, performance studies, race and ethnic studies, American studies, and trans-hemispheric studies to works that were disseminated through the popular press and performance, Paulin illustrates the epistemological influence that stories of miscegenation had on the term “race” and the white versus black paradigm that created a racial divide in the United States.

Using a comparative approach, Paulin typically pairs a work of fiction with a drama in each chapter, organizing her materials chronologically. Thus, for example, the first chapter, “Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions as Surrogates,” examines Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) alongside Louisa May Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband” (1863). Paulin begins with Boucicault’s play, she explains, because it offers “a representative sample of the common tropes and themes used in narratives about interracial unions: forbidden love, the tragic death of the mulatta, and the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of black blood” (5). Both The Octoroon and Alcott’s stories served as historical and sociological precedents, voicing the idea that children of miscegenistic unions would always lead tragic lives that often ended in violence—either self-inflicted, due to the emotional burden of their mixed-race heritage in a society defined by a racial binary, or at the hands of others, given the threat they posed to the black versus white paradigm. Paulin argues that although these “multivalent figures” call into question the logic of the binary paradigm, ultimately their tragic fates reinforce the dominant values of the larger historical and social context in which these characters were created (9).

Chapter 2, “Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy,” discusses Bartley Campbell’s play The White Slave (1882) and William Dean Howells’s novel Imperative Duty (1892). Here, Paulin analyzes these two works in relation to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, finding that both literature and culture “marginalized blackness and glorified the past greatness of white society” (57). While Boucicault’s and Alcott’s works insinuate “democratic ideas” into their treatment of the tragic mulatta, Campbell’s play and Howells’s novel portray “unclassifiable person[s]” as objects of fear (61). Paulin explains that, in their works, such figures exceed the clearly defined boundaries of racial division and thus tap a growing fear that freed slaves would likewise exceed the boundaries of social divisions. She adds that this fear was especially trained on “intimate social spaces previously reserved for bourgeois whites, such as their parlors and bedrooms” (59). Paulin’s argument is intriguing because Campbell’s “unclassifiable” character is of European heritage (which is racially defined as “Other”) and of illegitimate birth, and within the world of the novel she is passed off as the daughter of an “octoroon.” As such an example illustrates, the fluidity of racial categories could be used paradoxically to reinforce societal structures that depended on a definitive line between “white” and everything else.

Chapter 3, “Staging the Unspoken Terror,” juxtaposes Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) with Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman (1905), which the author adapted from his novel of the same name and which became the basis of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Although these works espouse drastically different views—€”Dixon’s play seeks the “reestablishment of white domination,” while Chesnutt’s novel critiques the “corruption and hypocrisy of southern white-supremacist ‘tradition’ and government” (106)— Paulin notes that both rely upon the assumption that women are responsible for maintaining racial purity. Both also address racial violence: if, in Dixon, it can be stopped if the threat of miscegenation is eradicated, in Chesnutt it is an inevitable consequence of white power.

Chapter 4, “The Remix: Afro-Indian Intimacies,” addresses an often ignored topic in the discourse of miscegenation because it exists outside of the black/white binary: the legal…

Counseling Single Mothers of Multiple Heritage Children: What Is the Difference?

The Family Journal
Volume 21, Issue 4 (October 2013)
pages 396-401
DOI: 10.1177/1066480713488527

Kristin Harris, MA
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas

Richard Henriksen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Education
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas

Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, Ph.D., Professor of Education
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas

An instrumental qualitative multiple case study design was conducted on 3 single mothers raising multiple heritage children concerning issues involved in being a single mother and attempting to juggle socializing their children among two different cultures. Using constant comparison analysis, themes were assigned by analyzing the single mothers’ interview responses to determine the advantages and disadvantages that single mothers might face while raising multiple heritage children. Results indicate an array of pertinent issues single mothers might face while attempting to juggle family and social issues pertaining to raising a multiple heritage child on their own. Recommendations for counselors working with single mothers of multiple heritage children are presented.

Read or purchase the article here.