Mixed Race Studies

‘A New Holland Half-Caste’: Sealer and Whaler Tommy Chaseland

History Australia
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2008
pages 08.1-08.15
DOI: 10.2104/ha080008

Lynette Russell, Professor
Monash University, Australia

This article discusses the life of Tommy Chaseland, a ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal son of a convict who became a renowned sealer and whaler and emigrated to New Zealand in the early part of the nineteenth century. Once located in the New Zealand south islands Chaseland became Tame Titirene – a legendary Southlands figure. Chaseland’s story offers us a glimpse of nineteenth century agency in which Aboriginal people were able to participate in the new social structures which had emerged from the establishment of European colonies. The maritime industries of sealing and whaling provided an avenue for financial gain which enabled entrepreneurial men like Chaseland to set their own destiny. This article has been peer-reviewed.

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COLORED VASSAR GIRL.

The Saint Paul Globe
Sunday, 1897-09-05
page 21, column 7

People at Poughkeepsie Thought Miss Hemmings Was a Spaniard.

Anita Florence Hemmings, the Boston girl who has stirred up such a sensation by daring to complete a course at exclusive Vassar when she new that there was negro blood in her veins, is a handsome, modest and refined young woman. Both her mother and father are mulattoes, the father of each being white. Miss Hemmings herself shows few traces of her black ancestors. She is a decided brunette, but her black hair is as straight as that of an Indian’s, and it was supposed by most of her college mates that she was a Spaniard.

The Hemmings have lived in Boston for twenty-five years. Anita was always a studious girl. She attended the Boston grammar school and was afterward graduated from the girls high school. Then she expressed a desire to go to college. Vassar was her choice, and there she went. Mr. Hemmings denies the report that a wealthy lady who had taken an interest in Anita paid the bills. He says he paid them himself, as he was amply able to do. Anita did not think it necessary to announce that her parents were mulattoes, and no one suspected that she was not of pure Caucasian blood.

Miss Hemmings’ friends say that the report that she waa a reigning social favorite at Vassar is an exaggeration. She was modest and retiring, making few friends and not seeking to take a prominent part in social life. Her pure, sweet soprano voice won for her a place in the college glee club, but she did not belong to any other of the various college societies. Miss Hemmings spent her summers at Cottage City, where she was received in the best of society. The fact that there is a trace of Ethiopian blood in her veins was discovered after she left college by the publication, in a Boston paper, of an item concerning her brother, who was recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The penalties of miscegenation

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 3, 1972
pages 10-12
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969062

Mary Dines (1927-2011)

Paragraph 24 of “Commonwealth Citizens: Control after Entry: Immigration Rules” (Cmd. 4295) reads:

“If a man who was admitted as a visitor or student, or in some other temporary capacity, marries a woman who is a resident in the United Kingdom, he is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay or any other variation of conditions to enable him to settle here unless refusal would be undesirable because of the degree of hardship which, in the particular circumstances of the case, would be caused if the woman had to live outside the United Kingdom in order to be with her husband after marriage…”

These instructions are based on a rule announced by the Home Secretary in January 1969 as an “administrative procedure” and the principles involved were never submitted to Parliament in the form of a Clause or an amendment to a Bill. At the time, Mr. Callaghan stated that the intention was to put an end to the facility allowed to male fiancés to settle in the U.K. after marriage which then existed. This facility, he claimed, was being abused, particularly by Asians, as a means of seeking entry to the U.K. without an employment voucher. It is not proposed to go into the arguments about male fiancés at this stage and indeed experience has shown that this matter was used as a camouflage for the real motives behind the introduction of the new rules. A careful study of the wording confirms this and it should be noted that the Home Office say that the man marrying a resident here “is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay” (my italics).

In any discussion on racial prejudice in Britain the question of miscegenation is bound to arise. Even in colonial times the British showed a marked aversion to mixed marriages. Significantly the majority of those that did take place were between “other ranks” of occupying armies and local women in places like…

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Visible and Invisible Hapa Exhibit at Japanese American Museum San Jose

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2016-05-20

Grace Hwang Lynch

Bay Area people… there’s an exhibit about the history of hapa Japanese Americans at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose.

Titled Visible and Invisible, it’s similar to the exhibit of the same name at LA’s Japanese American National Museum, but this collection is unique and has many ties to the local area.

Curated by historical sociologist Cindy Nakashima and art professor Fred Liang, the small but significant collection shows the history of mixed-race Japanese Americans from the 1860s to the current day, when the majority of Japanese Americans are projected to be mixed-race by 2020. “The first Nisei was a hapa, for heaven’s sake!” says Nakashima, who also curated the 2013 Los Angeles exhibit with Lily Anne Yumi Welty and Duncan Ryuken Williams.

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Jane Marchant: A Century of Progress

Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics
2016-06-13

Jane Marchant

Uncovering the story of a grandmother’s racial passing and its effect on following generations.

It is winter here and there are no leaves in sight. I am standing in front of what was once 684 East 39th Street, once part of Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing projects. Gray dust swirls to the sides of the roads; it also covers cars. Gray light shines through gray clouds and gray glass litters Bronzeville’s streets, in the South Side. The Chicago Housing Authority demolished my Grandma Barbara’s first home. In place of the two-bedroom apartment that housed my Grandma Barbara, her two siblings, and their mother – and generations after them, as the city’s public housing projects shifted from idyllic dream to dangerous nightmare – are three-story apartment buildings for rent or sale. Demolition of the Ida B. Wells Homes began in 2002 and construction for the Oakwood Shores replacement development is nearly complete. A manufactured park cuts the new housing development in two, Lake Michigan breaks against the shore barely a mile east, and skyscrapers rise in the distance. Barely five months ago, I did not know my Grandma Barbara grew up in Chicago’s first housing projects segregated for black residents. She kept many things hidden from me, and the outside world. Among Grandma Barbara’s secrets was that her mother was black.

I love my Grandma Barbara. I loved her as I grew up in a predominantly-white neighborhood; I loved her when I wasn’t allowed to play with her hair, when she ate peanuts and jelly beans at our dining-room table, and when I understood she and my mother were somehow different from the white mothers around us, but I did not understand why. I loved Grandma Barbara in her hospital bed, as she told the nurses she was from Spain, as she lay dying. I love her as she rests in a jar on my aunt’s mantelpiece. But Grandma Barbara told her children and grandchildren lies about who we are.

I find myself, repeatedly, asking, Why? Slavery’s dangers do not exist anymore. The segregation of Grandma Barbara’s youth does not legally exist anymore. When she was on her deathbed in 2007, she was no longer called a mulatto, my mother no longer called a quadroon; I am not called an octoroon, my children will not be named mustifees and my grandchildren will not be mustifinos. We are not in the French Southern States of the 1800s and my great-grandchildren will never be called quarterons, and their children sang-meles. Our one drop will no longer enslave us all. So what was Grandma Barbara hiding from?…

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Hybrid by Robert Wood

Mascara Literary Review
2015-10-04

Robert Wood

Robert Wood grew up in a multicultural household in Perth. He holds degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a National Undergraduate Scholar and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow respectively. He has edited for Margaret River Press, Wild Dingo Press and Overland, and volunteered for the Small Press Network, Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Books through Bars. He has published work in literary journals such as Southerly, Plumwood Mountain and Counterpunch and a academic journals including Foucault Studies, JASAL and Journal of Poetics Research. He currently hosts a reading and conversation series at The School of Life and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.

What is the hybrid to do?

I have passed as a white man for most of my life. I have a name – Robert Wood – that is invisible in the hegemonic Anglo society of suburban Australia. I have a body that if a little tanned, a little hook nosed, a little ‘Latin’ or ‘Mediterranean’, is nevertheless unthreateningly, benignly unnoticeable. I present in dress and language, in what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, as white. But I am also a person of colour. My mother is brown. She is Malayalee from Kerala in South India. Although there are degrees of complexity and complexion in the vales and folds of family history, through her I participate in a network of colouredness. Colouredness means both the aesthetic reality of the body itself, how we look, and the political meaning of bodies, how we are represented. In other words my mother’s skin is literally not ‘white’ (or for that matter ‘pink’, ‘yellow’ or ‘black’) and we have a shared history of colonial oppression that is racially based, which involves the British, the Portugese and northern India…

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“White Enough to Pass”: Uncovering the story of John Wesley Gibson

underbelly: From the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library
2016-01-21

Excerpt from William Still’s 1872 book, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, & c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisors, of the Road, E450 .S85, MdHS. (reference photo)

“John Wesley Gibson represented himself to be not only the slave, but also the son of William Y. Day, of Taylor’s Mount, Maryland…” This is the opening statement of a slave narrative that tells the story of a man who chose freedom in a place and time that allowed slavery — Maryland in the 1850s. The short narrative offers details of his appearance (looks like his father); job description (farm foreman); his age (28); how he escaped (passed as a white man) and how he detested bondage (severe restrictions). Little else is known of John Wesley Gibson other than one paragraph of information in a 780-page history of the Underground Railroad published in 1872. After Gibson escaped, where did he go? What was his life like at Taylor’s Mount? Is there a way to verify the information in the narrative? His mother Harriet and sister Frances were mentioned in the story. What happened to them? How do we find out more info? Or are they lost to history?…

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Book Launch: A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs

The Powerhouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Telephone: 718.666.3049
Wednesday 2016-06-15, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Focusing on individuals and their experiences, Allyson Hobbs examines how racial passing became both a strategy for survival and an avenue to loss.

About A Chosen Exile:

Racial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not. Between the late-eighteenth and midtwentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities, without any available avenue for return. Lives were lost only to be remembered in family stories. In A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs helps us to understand how racial ambiguity can be a cross to bear as well as a blessing for those of indeterminate color.

Much of the existing literature on passing is dominated by a focus on what its practitioners gained socially, culturally, economically or politically through assuming a white identity; Hobbs departs from this interpretation by suggesting that passing also resulted in loss, most significantly the loss of family and community ties. To pass as white was to make the decision to turn one’s back on a black racial identity and to claim to belong to a group to which one was not legally assigned.

When one decided to pass as white, a sense of embeddedness in a community or a collectivity was lost. Passing reveals that the essence of identity is not in an individual’s qualities, but rather in the ways that one recognizes himself or herself and is recognized as kindred. These forms of recognition may begin with superficial markers such as skin color, speech, and dress, but these are only indicators of relations to powers, ways of being in the world, and an imagined sharing of a common origin and iconic experiences. Passing, then, works as a prism: it refracts different aspects of what we commonly think of as race and reveals what is left once an ascribed status is stripped away.

Hobbs explores how race-making goes beyond skin color to one’s connection to family, culture, and community as well as to the popular perception of race in the larger society. Focusing on individuals and their experiences, A Chosen Exile examines how passing became both a strategy for survival and an avenue to loss.

About the Author:

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. You can find more information on her website: http://allysonhobbs.com/.

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