Mixed Race Studies

Tales of the struggles, successes of the racially mixed [Book Review]

The Boston Globe
2011-05-21

Jan Stuart

In the final offering of Danzy Senna’s new short story collection, “You Are Free,’’ a racially mixed woman sits in a bustling LA fast-food joint over a plate of macaroni and cheese, counting the mixed-race couples enjoying their Sunday lunch.

A refined radar for other folks of multicolored heritage has bound Senna’s characters since her debut novel, “Caucasia,’’ in which a light-skinned black teenager named Birdie has a white Jewish identity foisted upon her by her white mother, who is on the run from a violent radical past. Birdie ultimately reclaims her blackness, along with her estranged black family, at the end of a bruising odyssey. “I had become someone I didn’t like,’’ she confesses. “Someone who had no voice or color or conviction.”

Senna established her voice and convictions forcefully with “Caucasia,’’ but the peace of mind intimated by her heroine’s hard-won closure has proven to be illusory. The predominantly mixed-race protagonists of “You Are Free’’ continue to wallow in the societal pressures and inner tumult wrought by their ambiguous skin color and racially fused DNA. And their turmoil is palpable. A couple’s polyracial family tree is “cultural chaos.’’ A character’s indeterminate features are perceived as “a confusion of races.’’ Interracial couples are self-mockingly pegged as “that mewling and defensive group.”…

Read the entire review here.

Birthers’ shameful racist roots

The Boston Globe
2011-05-02

James Carroll

It was not up to President Obama to label the birther movement as racist in his extraordinary address on the subject last week, but plenty of commentary has done it for him. There can be no doubt that the lurid contempt shown to the president by antagonists who question his constitutional right to hold office is rooted in white-supremacist hysteria. The issue has never been the authenticity of documentation related to Barack Obama’s date and place of birth, which is why the production of birth certificates—first short, then long—has not stilled the controversy.

The issue has been his character as—well, as the issue of a Caucasian mother and an African father. An inch below the surface of this discussion is the perceived offense not just of blackness, but of miscegenation, that peculiarly demonic legacy of a slave system which took for granted the white owners’ sexual exploitation of slaves, while outlawing interracial sex. The biological fact of Obama’s existence, not the bureaucratic fact of government records, is what generates the lunatic rage…

Read the entire editorial here.

Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebears

The Boston Globe
2011-02-20

Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Randall Lee Gibson, an urbane, Yale-educated Confederate general, mocked black people as “the most degraded of all races of men.’’ Later, as a US senator from Louisiana, he helped broker the end of Reconstruction, freeing the South to harass and lynch blacks virtually at will.

In the 20th century, his orphaned son, Preston, was raised by an aunt and her husband, who had been a justice on the US Supreme Court that legitimated racial segregation in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a rent-a-car employee and genealogy buff dubbed himself Sir Thomas Murphy after tracing his mother’s lineage to English aristocracy. His father’s line remained a mystery.

None of these white people knew that they had African-American ancestors who had “passed for white.’’

Race has always been an inherently unstable construct of nature, culture, and law. Should one be considered black if one grandparent or great-grandparent was black? Or does the “one-drop’’ rule hold, that a single black forebear makes one black? Does “race’’ exist in the eye of the beholder, or solely in the mind of the beheld. In today’s age of mixed-race chic—in which Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter are hailed as beautiful royalty—such questions may seem quaint. But throughout American history, the consequences have been deadly.

“The Invisible Line,’’ Daniel J. Sharfstein’s spellbinding chronicle of racial passing in America, reminds us that the phenomenon has existed since our Colonial beginnings—as escape from oppression, enhancement in status, and path to economic opportunity. However well defined in law, the racial line has always remained porous, breachable under the right conditions…

Read the entire review here.