Mixed Race Studies

Race as freedom: how Cedric Dover and Barack Obama became black

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 2
pages 222-240
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.715661

Nico Slate, Associate Professor of History
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives and ideas of two mixed-race individuals, one born in Calcutta and the other in Hawaii, this article examines cosmopolitanism, racial formation and the promise of the ‘post-racial’. A ‘Eurasian’ intellectual born in Calcutta in 1904, Dover developed a coloured cosmopolitanism that mirrors in revealing ways Obama’s approach to race. Both men embraced blackness while transcending the boundaries of race and nation. Dover and Obama developed a conception of race as freedom—not freedom from race or of a particular race, but the freedom to embrace race without sacrificing other affiliations.

We must be both “racial” and anti-racial at the same time, which really means that nationalism and internationalism must be combined in the same philosophy. Cedric Dover (1947, 222)

I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. Barack Obama (2008)

Born a Eurasian in Calcutta in 1904. Cedric Dover died in England in 1961 a ‘coloured’ man. Born to a white mother in Hawaii in 1961 and raised partially in Indonesia. Barack Obama became the first African…

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Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

Harvard University Press
April 2014
288 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
30 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674047556

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies
Brown University

Creating a sensation with her risqué nightclub act and strolls down the Champs Elysées, pet cheetah in tow, Josephine Baker lives on in popular memory as the banana-skirted siren of Jazz Age Paris. In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar.

Her performing days numbered, Baker settled down in a sixteenth-century chateau she named Les Milandes, in the south of France. Then, in 1953, she did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Les Milandes attracted an adoring public eager to spend money on a utopian vision, and to worship at the feet of Josephine, mother of the world.

Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project—its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular—Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference by creating a family out of the troublesome material of race.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Too Busy to Die
• 2. No More Bananas
• 3. Citizen of the World
• 4. Southern Muse
• 5. Ambitious Assemblages
• 6. French Disney
• 7. Mother of a Wounded World
• 8. Unraveling Plots
• 9. Rainbow’s End
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

“They Treated Us Just Like Indians”: The Worlds of Bennett County, South Dakota

University of Nebraska Press
2002
156 pages
Illus., maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9830-9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4800-7

Paula L. Wagoner, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

On a typical day in Bennett County, South Dakota, farmers and ranchers work their fields and tend animals, merchants order inventory and stock shelves, teachers plan and teach classes, health workers aid the infirm in the county hospital or clinic, and women make quilts and heirlooms for their families or the county fair. Life is usually unhurried, with time for chatting with neighbors and catching up on gossip. But Bennett County is far from typical.

Nearly a century ago the county was carved out of Pine Ridge Reservation and opened to white settlers. Today Bennett County sits awkwardly between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux Reservations, with nearly one-third of its land classified as “Indian Country” and the rest considered by many Pine Ridge Lakotas to still belong to the reservation. The county is home to a dynamic population, divided by the residents into three groups—”whites,” “fullbloods,” and “mixedbloods.” Tensions between the three groups lurk admid the quiet harmony of Bennett County’s everyday rural life and emerge in moments of community crisis.

In a moving account, anthropologist Paula L. Wagoner tells the story of Bennett County, using snapshots of community events and crises, past and present, to reveal the complexity of race relations and identities there. A homecoming weekend at Bennett County High School becomes a flashpoint for controversy because of the differences of meaning ascribed by the county’s three identity groups to the school’s team name—the Warriors. At another time, the shooting of a Lakota man by a local non-Indian rancher and the volatile wake that follows demonstrate the impulse to racialize disputes that lies just beneath the surface of everyday life.

Yet such very real problems of identity have not completely overwhelmed Bennett County. Wagoner also shows that despite their differences, residents have managed to find common ground as a region of “diverse insiders” who share an economic dependency on federal funds, distrust outsiders, and, above all, deeply love their land.

Baseball’s Secret Pioneer

Slate
2014-02-04

Peter Morris, Baseball Historian
Haslett, Michigan

Stefan Fatsis, Sports Writer

William Edward White, the first black player in major-league history, lived his life as a white man.

On June 22, 1937, Joe Louis knocked out James Braddock with a right to the jaw to become the world heavyweight champion. At a time when Major League Baseball was still a decade from integration, Louis’ victory in Chicago’s Comiskey Park was a triumph for black America, and for racial progress. “What my father did was enable white America to think of him as an American, not as a black,” Joe Louis Jr. told ESPN in 1999. “By winning, he became white America’s first black hero.”

Three months before the fight, another notable moment involving race and sports occurred in the same city: the death of a 76-year-old man named William Edward White, of blood poisoning after a slip on an icy sidewalk and a broken arm. Fifty-eight years earlier, White played a single game for the Providence Grays of baseball’s National League to become, as best as can be determined, the first African-American player in big-league history. Unlike Louis’ knockout, though, White’s death merited no coverage in the local or national press. A clue as to why can be found in cursive handwriting in box No. 4 on White’s death certificate, which is labeled COLOR OR RACE. The box reads: “White.”

William Edward White was born in 1860 to a Georgia businessman and one of his slaves, who herself was of mixed race. That made White, legally, black and a slave. But his death certificate and other information indicate that White spent his adult life passing as a white man. Since the 1879 game was unearthed a decade ago, questions about White’s race have clouded his legacy. If he didn’t want other people to think of him as black, did he actually break the sports world’s most infamous racial barrier? Or is the reality of his racial heritage, and the difficult personal issues it no doubt forced him to confront, enough to qualify him as a pioneer? Should William Edward White be recognized during Black History Month alongside Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and other groundbreaking African-Americans?

These are complicated questions. Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of American history at Stanford, says the practice of “racial passing” in America dates at least to runaway slaves in the 1700s. Slaves, she says, often attempted to pass as white to gain their freedom but then lived out their lives as black. By the Jim Crow era, when William White came of age, the social and economic advantages of living as white—and the disadvantages of living as black—were so profound that people who could successfully pass did so and never looked back.

“People who passed did not want to leave a trace,” says Hobbs, whose book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life will be published by Harvard University Press in the fall. “They did not want to leave records, they did not want to have anyone find them, to discover that they were passing. It’s very difficult to get a well-rounded image of these people’s lives, and that’s by their design. It’s a hidden history, and it’s one that can be very frustrating because there is often so little data available about these people.”…

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Elsie’s Business

University of Nebraska Press
2006
216 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9865-1

Frances Washburn, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies and English
University of Arizona

Beaten, raped, and left for dead at the side of a road on the Standing Rock Reservation, young Elsie Roberts disappears into her self to revisit the haunts of her childhood and, perhaps, the depths of her experience to uncover the deepest mystery of all. In Elsie’s Business, Elsie’s search through her own memories ultimately intersects with the search of a stranger who is seeking Elsie’s story.

A picture emerges of a poor child, half black and half Native, whose mother has barely eked out a living for the two of them by tanning deerskins and cleaning houses. Rebuilding her life in a different town as a housekeeper, tanner, and beader of moccasins and bags, much like her mother, the taciturn Elsie finds modest comfort and connections among the white people who employ and befriend her. But her peace is fleeting, for someone from her past, or possibly her present, would like to see her silenced completely. A mystery of mesmerizing suspense and sadness, Elsie’s Business weaves the story of a ravaged woman into the traditional tales of her people to create a vivid sense of communities bound by storytelling and understanding and sundered by ignorance and silence.

Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television

Duke University Press
2005
280 pages
24 b&w photos
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3543-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3531-3

Yeidy M. Rivero, Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts and Culture and the Program in American Culture
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico’s commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico’s national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed “blackness” in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons—from the performer Ramón Rivero’s use of blackface and “black” voice in the 1940s and 1950s, to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s, to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all Puerto Rican stations and threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness brings to the forefront the marginalization of nonwhite citizens in Puerto Rico’s media culture and raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Translating Televisual Blackness
• 1. Caribbean Negritos: Ramon Rivero, Blackface, and Black Voice in Puerto Rico
• 2. Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and the Resurgent Popularity of Blackface
• 3. The CubaRican Space Revisited
• 4. Mi familia: A Black Puerto Rican Televisual Family
• 5. Translating and Representing Blackness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The ‘white’ student who integrated Ole Miss

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-02-05

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of American History
Stanford University

(CNN) — When Harry S. Murphy arrived at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1945, he was nervous. He landed at Ole Miss by way of the Navy’s V-12 program, a wartime measure that allowed young men to take college classes, receive naval training and preparation to become officers.

Murphy was black, but university officials did not know that. He had a white complexion and wavy brown hair. A military official checked the “W” box for white when Murphy enlisted in the Navy.

This official unwittingly set Murphy on an entirely new path. Murphy explained that he had no intention to “pass,” and once at Ole Miss in Oxford, no one inquired about his race.

“I guess they just assumed I was white,” Murphy said.

If no one asked, why tell?

Passing—the choice to leave behind a black racial identity and present oneself as white—allowed many African-Americans to navigate a racist society. In today’s multiracial America, the decision to pass may seem unnecessary and unwarranted.

But historically, erasing one’s black identity was one of a limited number of avenues available to light-skinned African-Americans to secure a better life in the era of legalized segregation.

Those who passed often reaped financial rewards, gained social privileges and enjoyed the fun of “getting over” by playing a practical joke on unsuspecting whites and winning a clandestine war against Jim Crow America…

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Biracial, and also black

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-02-12

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan

(CNN) — My winter 2010 seminar began the way I start every class. I made introductory remarks about themes and requirements for my course on the history of race, law and marriage in the United States.

“Now,” I prompted, “let’s go around. Tell us about yourself and why you chose this course.”

This introduction was routine. But what I heard was anything but the norm: “My mother is black and my father is white.” “I’m in an interracial relationship.”

Ordinarily, I am silent, listening and taking notes. But by the time I heard a third student say “I am mixed-race, from a mixed race family,” I had set down my notebook and was perched at the edge of my seat.

“Me, too,” I heard myself say. And with that, I knew that the class would be anything but routine. Until that moment, I had always told a neater story about my identity. I was, simply put, black. And about my mother being white? That had been irrelevant for me and my “one drop rule” generation.

My students had another perspective…

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Miscegenating Racial Representations: Critical Mixed Race Strategies and the Visual Arts

College Art Association 102nd Annual Conference
Hilton Chicago
720 South Michigan Avenue
International South, 2nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60605
2014-02-15, 14:30-17:00 CST (Local Time)

Chairs:

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

Margo Machida, Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

This session will examine critical mixed race strategies for the miscegenation of racial representation in the visual arts. The 2000 U.S. Census was first to allow individuals to self enumerate as more than one race. Making multiracial populations visible both expanded the borders, blurred and posed a potential threat to existing monoracial categories. Beginning in the early 2000s there was a simultaneous neoliberal and conservative push for a postidentitarian/ postracial moment posed against the putative ossification of multicultural racial identity constructs. Curatorial frameworks and studio practices centered on race as a locus of investigation were challenged if not rendered invisible and seemingly obsolete. And yet race and attendant cultural issues have demonstrably remained pertinent for artistic production and analysis. A double tension has resulted in moves to both recognize the continuing importance of race and the critical push to reframe and disarticulate categories that cannot contain the complexity of increasingly miscegenated peoples, histories, and subjectivities. We will consider how dominant conceptions of race have changed (or not) in the visual arts as a result of the mounting discourses and bodies of artistic production that bring forward mixed race identity in various domestic, transnational and international contexts.

Beyond the Bronze Venus
Alison Fraunhar, Associate Professor of Art and Design
Saint Xavier University

Sensory Miscegenations: Representing Multiracial Bodies
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, California College of the Arts

Lacuna
Maya Isabella Mackrandilal, Independent Artist

Liminal Embodiments
Zavé Martohardjono, Independent Artist

Risky Subjectivity: Select Works by Korean Adoptee Artists
Eun Jung Park, Independent Scholar

Why I Can’t Be My Son’s Mother

The Blog
The Huffington Post
2014-02-04

Shannon Shelton Miller

My 6-month-old wouldn’t smile for his stage mom, no matter what faces she made or how much she cooed in his ear. So the photographer asked for my help. I positioned myself next to the camera, directly in my son’s view, then dangled his favorite toy frog above the lens. He burst into laughter and the photographer snapped away, getting the happy baby shots the company wanted for its new product packaging.

We were done. But as my son’s Mom-for-a-Day handed him back to me, I couldn’t help thinking about how much easier it would have been if I had been cast as the mother from the beginning.

My skin was just too dark.

Acting has been a longtime hobby of mine, and I’ve been lucky to land some small jobs for ads ranging from medical equipment to vacuum cleaners. When I took acting classes, my instructors often told me that directors preferred to cast parents with their own kids for family commercials so the emotions would appear more natural. But those teachers weren’t thinking about the glaring exceptions to that rule—the white mother with her cocoa-skinned children, or the African-American mother, like me, with her vanilla baby.

Last spring, a Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial family triggered an eruption of hate speech on the company’s YouTube channel. Consumers didn’t mind, though; supportive comments significantly outnumbered hateful ones, and nearly all agreed that the biracial daughter was adorable. The commercial was a winner for Cheerios, so much so that the cereal giant released a new version that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, continuing to push against a boundary that remains curiously in place in American advertising. It’s the one place where biracial families are still invisible.

Corporations will happily cast a rainbow of Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian and African-American actors for their commercials in the name of diversity, but they’re rarely cast together. I seethed last year when I read one casting call for a major retailer requesting “real” Caucasian and African-American families, and then, in capital letters in the next sentence: “NO MIXED FAMILIES.”…

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