Mixed Race Studies

Fighting the ‘White Man’s War’

The New York Times
2013-07-19

Aaron Barnhart and Diane Eickhoff

The Battle of Honey Springs was one of the only Civil War engagements where the majority of the combatants were non-white.

Three miles down a gravel road near Rentiesville, Okla., sits a portable building that, for now, serves as the headquarters for the Honey Springs Battlefield State Historic Site. Here, on July 17, 1863, one of the Civil War’s most unique, consequential — and forgotten — battles took place. The Battle of Honey Springs was one of the few engagements in which the majority of the combatants were nonwhite, and it played an outsize role in the future of the Indian Territory, long after the war ended.

When the Civil War broke out, most American Indians on the frontier understandably wanted no part of it. They were far from the action, and many had recently been forcibly removed to present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. And yet, many Indians were eventually pulled into “the white man’s war.”

Unlike the Indians who were herded into present-day Kansas from Northern states, the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory — Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole — were Southern in their outlook and politics. Across five Southern states, they intermarried with whites, built houses in town and owned plantations with slaves.

None of this protected them from envious neighbors who, as the interior South was settled in the early 19th century, demanded that authorities seize their sovereign lands. By the early 1820s the “Great Father,” as they called the American presidents, was summoning chiefs to Washington to sign land-cession treaties. These agreements became wedges that violently split each of the five tribal nations…

…Meanwhile, the pro-Southern Indian regiments led by Gen. Stand Watie, a mixed-blood Cherokee, and Gen. Douglas Hancock Cooper were proving useful to the Confederacy. Cooper, a Mississippi native and veteran of the Mexican War, was a commissioned colonel of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations before the war. Watie, a skilled horseman, worked well with the white guerrillas who assumed a larger role in the Confederate military now that the regular army was largely gone from the region.

After the Battle of Pea Ridge gave the Union Army control over Missouri, the war leadership in Richmond had ordered most Western regiments east to slow the momentum of Ulysses S. Grant along the Mississippi River. Whether this abandonment of the trans-Mississippi was inevitable or a big blunder, it put in play the territory that had acted as a buffer for Texas and extended the Southern empire to the border of Kansas, the most aggressively anti-slavery state in the Union, with more men per capita enlisted in the federal army than any other state.

By June 1863, Kansas had a general who was ready to occupy this former Confederate stronghold. Gen. James G. Blunt, physician by training and a staunch ally of James Lane, was the new commander of the Army of the Frontier. He welcomed these newly formed black and Indian regiments, which now included companies from the Cherokee nation that had become disillusioned with the Confederacy…

Read the entire article here.

In Wake of Zimmerman Verdict, Obama Makes Extensive Statement on Race in America [with video]

The New York Times
2013-07-19

Mark Landler, White House Correspondent

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — President Obama, making a surprise appearance on Friday in the White House briefing room to address the verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing, spoke in personal terms about the experience of being a black man in the United States, trying to put the case in the perspective of African-Americans. They were Mr. Obama’s most extensive comments on race since 2008, and his most extensive as president.

“I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away,” Mr. Obama said in the briefing room. “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.”…

…Mr. Obama issued a statement shortly after the verdict. But on Friday, he talked more broadly about his own feelings about the verdict and the impact it has had among African-Americans. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”…

…Mr. Obama had been under pressure from some African-Americans to weigh in more forcefully after the verdict. For several days, his spokesman deflected questions about Mr. Obama reaction.

But on Friday, after several days of silence, the president appeared eager to offer his thoughts. He declined to take questions, but talked at length about his personal experience as a black man and about the historical context that shapes African-American responses to cases like the one involving Mr. Martin.

“That all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different,” Mr. Obama said.

When Mr. Martin was shot in 2012, the president offered an emotional response, saying that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” and adding that “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”…

Read the entire article here.

Invitation to a Dialogue: The Myth of ‘Race’

The New York Times
2013-07-15

John L. Hodge, Retired lawyer, Former Professor of Philosophy and Author
Boston

To the Editor:

What should we do about “race”?

Over many decades, those who study genetics have found no biological evidence to support the idea that humans consist of different “races.” Based on such scientific data, Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race” in 1942. New discoveries have confirmed what he said then. So why, over seven decades after his book, do we keep talking and living as though biological “races” exist?

Not only are certain “racial” classifications flawed, as suggested in “Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?” (Sunday Review, July 7); all “racial” classifications are inherently flawed, because they are based on the false idea of “race.”…

Read the entire article here.

New York’s Mixed-Race Riot

The New York Times
2013-07-15

Lisa Orr, Professor of English
Utica College, Utica, New York

When draft rioters set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York on the night of July 13, 1863, one man in the crowd called out, “If there is a man among you with a heart within him, come and help these poor children!” Incensed, the crowd turned on him and almost dismembered him. But he had distracted them, enabling the orphans to escape.

The rioters were Irish. So was the man who sacrificed himself. And chances are good that at least some of those orphans were part Irish, too.

In the years before the Civil War, Irish immigrants to Northern cities inhabited the same slums as free blacks, worked alongside them in the worst jobs and often married them. Antebellum New York held no large, specifically black neighborhoods. Many slaves freed in New York’s gradual emancipation settled in the Sixth Ward, along with other low-income people of Irish, German and Jewish descent. Those neighborhoods were unified mainly by the kind of work residents performed: cartmen, corn sellers and prostitutes all plied their wares around the infamous Five Points. With the rapid influx of immigrants during the famine years of the 1840s, the majority of the neighborhood became Irish. But the hardscrabble, interracial lifestyle remained…

…Harmonious or not, most mixed-race marriages in New York were between Irish women and black men and mulatto children were common. The year 1850 saw a new racial category, mulatto, added to the census, to account for their offspring. When the draft came, during a heat wave in the bleak middle of the Civil War, the mob targeted mixed-race households, especially those containing Irish women who had children with African-American men.

Southerners used the threat of amalgamation to undermine Northern support for the war. A United States representative from a border state, arguing that Republicans favored total race equality, described “a ball held at Five Points in the city of New York, where white women and negroes mingled `in sweet confusion in the mazy dance.’” (His opponent, Francis W. Kellogg, Republican of Michigan, pointed out that Five Points was within the strongest Democratic ward in the city.)

Two New York City Democrats invented the term miscegenation during the 1864 election campaign. “The present war … is a war for the negro,” argued a faked Republican pamphlet, designed to discredit Lincoln. “Let it go on until … the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our President, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.” One subhead was entitled, “The Irish and Negroes First to Comingle.”…

Read the entire article here.

In Florida, a Death Foretold

The New York Times
2012-03-31

Isabel Wilkerson

In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Refusing to Identify by Race

The New York Times
2013-07-11

Carlos Hoyt
Andover, Massachusetts

Re “Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 7 [2013]):

I recently completed a doctoral study at the Simmons School of Social Work about people who are commonly ascribed to the black/African-American, biracial or multiracial categories, but who do not themselves subscribe to any racial identity.

These race transcenders refuse to self-racialize, while being fully conscious of the fact that they are and have been racialized by others since the Constitution mandated the census, making racialization legal and compulsory beginning in 1790. We have been knotted up in meaningless terms like Caucasian ever since…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

The New York Times
2013-07-06

Shaila Dewan, Economics Reporter

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As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)…

…The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”…

…Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘White House Down’ and Black Presidents on Screen

The New York Times
2013-06-26

Mekado Murphy

At one point in the action thriller “White House Down,” which opens June 28, the president of the United States, played by Jamie Foxx, is trying to thwart a paramilitary group that has overtaken the White House. After swapping his more presidential footwear for basketball shoes, he kicks a bad guy in the face and yells, “Get your hands off my Jordans!”

It’s not a line many Hollywood versions of the leader of the free world would utter: he (it’s usually a he) is often stuffier, a little bland maybe, and most often white. “White House Down,” directed by Roland Emmerich, doesn’t wear the race of its president on its sleeve, but it doesn’t shy away from the fact either. Before President Obama’s election, Dennis Haysbert set the standard for television presidents with his portrayal of David Palmer on “24.” But memorable black commanders in chief have been harder to come by on the big screen. And as with their real-life counterparts, they get their way only some of the time…

Read the entire article here.

A Nation of Mutts

The New York Times
2013-06-28

David Brooks

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we’ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we’re possibly heading to 15 percent.

Moreover, up until now, America was primarily an outpost of European civilization. Between 1830 and 1880, 80 percent of the immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Over the following decades, the bulk came from Southern and Central Europe. In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage.

Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner…

…Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.

Because high immigration is taking place at a time of unprecedentedly low ethnic hostility, we’re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan. These people transcend existing categories and soften the social boundaries between groups.

This won’t lead to a bland mélange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa points out in his book, “Global Crossings,” the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Rare Visit Underscores Tangles in Obama’s Ties to Africa

The New York Times
2013-06-26

Michael D. Shear, Nicholas Kulish and Lydia Polgreen

DAKAR, Senegal — As a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama told a packed auditorium in Kenya’s capital, “I want you all to know that as your ally, your friend and your brother, I will be there in every way I can.”

But he will not be there. President Obama, who Wednesday began his second trip to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, will skip his father’s homeland once again, a reflection of the many challenges that his administration has faced in trying to make a lasting imprint across the continent.

Despite decades of American investment to promote stability in the volatile region of East Africa, Kenya just elected a president indicted by the International Criminal Court, accused of bankrolling death squads driven by ethnic rivalry. It was the outcome that Washington had desperately tried to avoid, and Mr. Obama’s advisers determined that a photo op of the American president shaking hands with a man awaiting trial was not one they needed.

“It just wasn’t the best time for the president to travel to Kenya at this point,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

For Africans across the continent, the election of an African-American president signaled a transformative moment in their relationship with the United States, one that would usher in a special understanding of their hopes and needs…

Read the entire article here.