Mixed Race Studies

Dolezal, Jenner raise fundamental questions about identity

The Boston Globe
2015-06-16

Farrah Stockman, Globe Staff

Finally, Rachel Dolezal — the self-identified black daughter of two Caucasian parents — has spoken. And finally, she was asked a question I’ve been wondering for days: When did it start?

“At a very young age,” she replied. “About 5 years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon.”

It’s impossible not to be reminded of how Bruce — now Caitlyn — Jenner answered a similar question: When did you know? Jenner talked about sneaking into her mother’s closet as an 8-year-old boy to dress up in her clothes.

Comparisons between Jenner, who recently appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair as a woman, and Dolezal, who just resigned as a local leader of the NAACP after her parents outed her as white, have spawned a cottage industry of jokes and memes.

But I have yet to read a real answer to the underlying challenge these two people pose to identity in America today: If we accept that gender is fluid — a reflection of some inexplicable spiritual thing inside of us — why not race? Why do we police the boundaries of blackness more rigorously than we police womanhood?

The general consensus seems to be that as much as we want to do away with racial differences and as deeply as we believe in race as a social construct, we can’t accept Dolezal as a black woman trapped in a spray-tanned blonde’s body…

Read the entire article here.

Dolezal Controversy Sharpens Focus on Racial Identity

University of Massachusetts Press
2015-06-26

The recent controversy concerning Rachel Dolezal’s racial identity steered many readers to a 2008 UMass Press book by Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, which explores cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as passing for black.

Many news venues—the New York Times, CNN, LA Times, The Atlantic, and others—found their way to Dreisinger to ask her thoughts. The controversy, Dreisinger told the New York Times, “taps into all of these issues around blackface and wearing blackness and that whole cultural legacy, which makes it that much more vile.”

In The Atlantic, Dreisinger said “I think it’s critical to recognize the ways in which American whites have a long legacy of fetishizing blackness, whether they’re literally passing or not, but the ways in which their notions of blackness are based upon caricatures, and not characters. They’re based on idealized or cartoonish notions of what blackness is.”…

Read the entire article here.

The ambiguity of racial categories

The Washington Post
2015-06-16

Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science
Columbia University, New York, New York

Racial classification has been in the news lately with the story of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP official who is ethnically white but characterized herself as black until the story came out:

The allegation lit up the Internet, fueled by Ms. Dolezal’s apparent refusal to give a direct answer about her racial background, and by family photos of her as a blue-eyed teenager with straight blond hair.

What does it mean to be white, or black, or mixed-race?

These questions are not going away. Richard Perez-Pena reports:

The number of American adults with mixed-race backgrounds is three times what official census figures indicate… The Pew Research Center survey found that 6.9 percent of adults in the United States were multiracial, based on how they identify themselves or on having parents or grandparents of different races. By comparison, the 2010 census reported 2.1 percent of adults, and 2.9 percent of people any age, as multiracial, based on people’s descriptions of themselves or others in their households. (Hispanics are considered an ethnic group, not a race.)…

Relevant to this discussion is a book from two years ago, “What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans,” by former Census Bureau director Ken Prewitt recommends taking the race question off the decennial census. As I summarized last time this came up, Prewitt recommends gradual changes, integrating the race and national origin questions while improving both. In particular, he would replace the main “race” question by a “race or origin” question, with the instruction to “Mark one or more” of the following boxes: “White,” “Black, African Am., or Negro,” “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “Some other race or origin.” He recommends treating Hispanic as a race or origin, in parallel with white, black, etc., which I agree makes sense. I think the current categorization in which “Hispanic” is an ethnic group but “White” and “Black” are races, is both confusing and unnecessary…

Read the entire article here.

What Is Whiteness?

Sunday Review
The New York Times
2015-06-20

Nell Irvin Painter, Professor Emerita of History
Princeton University

The terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal’s yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder is, of course, more consequential than one woman’s fiction. But the two are connected in a way that is relevant to many Americans.

An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”

On one side is Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old charged with murdering nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday. He’s part of a very old racist tradition, stretching from the anti-black violence following the Civil War, through the 1915 movie “The Birth of a Nation,” to today’s white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and gun-toting, apocalyptically minded Obama-haters. And now a mass murderer in a church.

On the other side is Ms. Dolezal, the former leader of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., who, it seems, mistakenly believed that she could not be both anti-racist and white. Faced with her assumed choice between a blank identity or a malevolent one, she opted out of whiteness altogether. Notwithstanding the confusion and anger she has stirred, she continues to say that she identifies as black. Fine. But why, we wonder, did she pretend to be black?

Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness, although that is not where these answers lie. It has become a common observation that blackness, and race more generally, is a social construct. But examining whiteness as a social construct offers more answers. The essential problem is the inadequacy of white identity…

Read the entire article here.

How Race Is Conjured

Jacobin
2015-06-29

Karen E. Fields, Independent Scholar

Barbara J. Fields, Professor of History
Columbia University, New York, New York

Cabs in Albany, GA (1962). Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress

The fiction of race hides the real source of racism and inequity in America today.

In the three years since Trayvon Martin was killed, the realities of police racism and violence, of segregation from schools to swimming pools, and of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow have returned to mainstream discussions. And now as Confederate flags disappear in the wake of the murders in Charleston, racism is once again at the center of the popular consciousness.

There is a window, then, for the US left to push a deeper and broader conversation about the implications of racism and to build working-class organizations that fight for social justice for all.

But that opportunity will only be open to the degree we can overcome the ideological legacy of the last three decades. Since the 1980s, structural inequality has been increasingly replaced by personal responsibility as the main explanation for gross inequality. At the same time, attention to persistent and structural racism faded, supplanted by a focus on race and “race relations.”

This could not have been possible without the enshrinement of race as a natural category, the spread of the fiction that certain traits define members of one “race” and differentiate them from members of other races.

No one has better articulated why race cannot serve as the starting point for discussions about inequality in the United States — and what we miss when they are — than Barbara and Karen Fields, authors of the 2012 book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.

Barbara and Karen were interviewed for Jacobin last week by Jason Farbman, a member of the International Socialist Organization in New York…

Read the entire interview here.

Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages

The New York Times
2015-06-28

Rachel L. Swarns

Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife and five children in Brooklyn.

The railroad carried him to the hot springs of Arkansas, the copper mines of Montana and the gold fields of the Pacific Northwest. Weary, lonesome and ailing, he sent letters of love and longing to his wife in New York City.

“I can see your dear face every night when I lay my head on the pillow,” he wrote. “I think of you and dream of you, and my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.”

Ada Todd saved those letters, symbols of devotion from her husband, James Todd, a fair-skinned black man from Baltimore who worked as a Pullman porter in the late 1800s, and spent weeks and sometimes months away from home.

His earnings allowed the family to move from a cramped, predominantly African-American section of Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn to a more residential street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to a spacious 11-room house in Flushing, Queens. It was only when he was dying in 1901 that Ms. Todd finally began to piece together the truth: Her husband was not from Baltimore. He was not a Pullman porter. And he was not a black man…

…Yet 19th-century history is dotted with such cases. White men and women driven by love, ambition or other circumstances sometimes leapt across the racial chasm, defying state laws and social conventions designed to keep blacks and whites apart.

“We’ll never know how many people did it,” said Martha A. Sandweiss, a historian at Princeton University who documented Mr. King’s double life for the first time in her book “Passing Strange,” which was published in 2009.

“If they did it well,” she said, “they’re invisible.”

Clarence King did it well…

Read the entire article here.

Texas woman discovers she’s white after 70 years

KHOU
Houston, Texas
2015-06-22

Marvin Hurst, Reporter
KENS 5 TV, San Antonio, Texas

Byrd with her adoptive family. (Photo: (Photo: Family Photograph))

The mere mention of Rachel Dolezal’s name sets Verda Byrd off like a stick of dynamite. “She lied about her race,” Byrd said. “I didn’t lie about my race because I didn’t know.”

Dolezal’s much publicized choice to identify herself as black has been under scrutiny. The former NAACP President in Spokane, Wash. is accused of deceiving the public by insisting she was not only of black descent but black herself.

Byrd considers herself African-American. Her preference in race comes through an incredible set of circumstances. She was born to Earl and Daisy Beagle in September 1942. They named her Jeanette. She describes her parents as white transients.

Earl walked out on his family. At the time, Daisy had five children to take care of. The struggling mother had to get a job to feed her kids and keep a roof over their heads. The woman fell 30 feet to the ground in a trolley accident. The state of Missouri took her children because she was in no shape to care for them…

Read the entire article here. Watch the story here.

“My father is black. My mother is white. I self-identify as black and as mixed and I don’t relate to those as mutually exclusive. I also try to be mindful and try to have a certain humility about how my experience differs from most other black people; about how I have certain types of residual white privilege which I don’t believe makes me less black. I also know that it is ultimately not up to me whether I am accepted as black. My experience though, has almost always been of black people welcoming me and accepting me as their own. And it’s only because of that lifetime of experience that I would feel comfortable telling Nancy Giles,“actually I’m black.” And I knew that even within that moment, I could tell her that and she would get it. And I’m not saying that there is never any exclusion within the black community. I’m not negating people who have experienced that. But I do think that there is a tradition of a loving welcoming inclusive blackness that is important as a rejection and a counter to the historical function of whiteness. It’s a tradition I’ve experienced as a beautiful thing and as Adam Serwer said, it’s a beautiful thing that Rachel Dolezal has “taken advantage of,” that she has manipulated, that she has poisoned just a little bit with what she’s done here.”

Jay Smooth, ““Empathy does not preclude accountability:” Jay Smooth on Rachel Dolezal,” Fusion, June 18, 2015 (00:01:53-00:03:11). http://fusion.net/video/153151/empathy-does-not-preclude-accountability-jay-smooth-on-rachel-dolezal/.

Why Rachel Dolezal Needed To Construct Her Own Black Narrative

BuzzFeed
2015-06-13

Adam Serwer, BuzzFeed News National Editor

In order to pass as black, Dolezal took advantage of the black community’s long tradition of inclusion regardless of skin tone.

In 1895, when Justice Henry Billings Brown ruled that Louisiana’s law segregating train cars was constitutional, he didn’t want to get into the messy business of determining whether or not passenger Homer Plessy was actually black. Though only possessing “one eighth African blood,” with “the mixture of colored blood” not “discernible in him,” whether Plessy was black was a matter for the state to decide.

“[T]here is a difference of opinion in the different States, some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race,” wrote Brown, “others that it depends upon the preponderance of blood; and still others that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths.”

Plessy v. Ferguson became the legal cornerstone of Jim Crow even though Homer Plessy was so light-skinned he could probably drive through Ferguson, Missouri, today without getting a ticket. In other words, who is black is a complicated question, one that remains fraught more than a hundred years after Brown’s ruling blessing racial apartheid in a country founded on the premise of equality under the law. But the long tradition of African-American resistance is one that excels in turning efforts to subjugate black Americans into advantages. One of these is the reversal of the infamous “one-drop rule,” which allows anyone who was a descendant of enslaved black Americans to identify as a member of the African-American community, which is why the NAACP’s Walter White used his racial ambiguity to report on lynchings in the South while passing as white. To claim is to be claimed; to love is to be loved in return. It is that very tradition of love and acceptance that Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader in Spokane, Washington, who for years passed as a light-skinned black woman, took advantage of by manufacturing a biography that reads like a racial caricature of a dystopian young adult novel.

Dolezal knew it wasn’t enough to perm and dye her hair and do whatever it is she did to her skin, and to tell everyone she was black. She also had to invent a history in which she and her family had borne the scars of racism, one in which she was born in a “tepee in Montana” and went hunting for food with bows and arrows. One in which she and her siblings endured beatings according to skin tone, and were lashed with “baboon whips” that were “pretty similar to what was used as whips during slavery,” to say nothing of the years she spent filing questionable reports with police about hate crimes. With that connection, even someone as light as her could be black.

The irony is that racial barriers in America have always been permeable and ambiguous, even when they have been most violently enforced…

Read the entire article here.

But Ms. [Rachel A.] Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.

Allyson Hobbs, “Rachel Dolezal’s Unintended Gift to America,” The New York Times, June 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/rachel-dolezals-unintended-gift-to-america.html.