Mixed Race Studies

“Miscegenation” at the North.

The Southern Banner, Athens, Georgia
1864-04-20
Page 4, column 2
Source: Athens Historic Newspapers Archive (Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE)

“Miscegenation“—the new term for amalgamation, is the last and newest phase of abolitionism at the North—openly and unblushtngly avowed, and preached even from the pulpit. The New York Times makes the following remarkable confession about the matter:

WHAT ARE WE COMING TO?

A rage for marrying black people has lately taken possession of the Republican party.—The Radicals have carried everything before them and if things go on at their present rate it is feared that, in three months, every white man who is not connected by marriage with a colored family will be “read out” of the party. The gusto with which the abolitionists go into the insane movement is something at once disgusting and alarming.   We shrink from putting on paper the stories which reach us as to the prevalence pf this evil. We will only say that there will very soon be hardly a family in the city belonging to the Republican persuasion which will not be glorying in the possession of a negro son-in-law. It is said, we know not with what truth, that the Union League Club has fitted up a night bell at its door, and keeps a black minister on the premises who marries all couples of different colors at any hour of the day or night. Soon we may expect to hear of duels being fought about some black washer-women, and crowds of white men thronging the basements of those families who have colored servants in their houses for the purpose of soliciting the honor (?) of their hands.

It is with great reluctance that we speak out our minds in this matter.—But we have no hesitation in saying that if we had at the outset conceived it possible that hostility to slavery would ever have led to wholesale intermarriage with negroes, the Republican party should never have received any countenance or support from this journal. We owe it to ourselves and to posterity to say that the thing has taken us by surprise.  It never entered our head. We now see and confess our error and deplore it.

The question which now naturally suggests itself to every right-minded white man and woman is, where is this thing to end? Whither are we tending? What is to be done to stop this unnatural and detestable movement? For it is as plain as a pike staff that if it continues there will be soon no whites left in this once great and prosperous country. We shall all be mulattoes, and be afflicted with all the peculiarities, both mental and physical of that unhappy race. The signs of this great and terrible change already begin to make themselves manifest in our streets; for the most careless observer who walks down Broadway can hardly fail to observe the appearance of a vast number of faces of the well known brownish tinge. Let that tinge once become general, and then farewell, to all our whiteness.

There is but one quarter—and we are not ashamed to own if—in which, in our opinion, we can look for either help or comfort, at this crisis, and that is to the great, old, truly national Democratic party. It has its faults; nobody has been forced to call attention to them oftener than we; but it has never yet proved false to its race, and we are satisfied that whatever can be done by it will be done to preserve the purity of our blood.

Same-Sex Issue Pushes Justices Into Overdrive

The New York Times
2012-12-09

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Correspondent

In the civil rights era, the Supreme Court waited decades to weigh in on interracial marriage. On Friday, by contrast, the court did not hesitate to jump into the middle of one of the most important social controversies of the day, agreeing to hear two cases on same-sex marriage.

By taking both, the court gave itself the chance to issue a sweeping ruling that would cast aside bans on same-sex marriage nationwide. But the speed with which the court moved also raised the possibility of a split decision, one that would provide federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states that allow such unions but would permit other states to forbid gay and lesbian couples from marrying…

…In private correspondence in 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter said the court was doing all it could to avoid hearing cases that would require giving the nation an answer about whether bans on interracial marriage — anti-miscegenation laws, in the parlance of the day — were constitutional.

“We twice shunted it away,” Justice Frankfurter wrote to Judge Learned Hand, “and I pray we will be able to do it again without being too brazenly evasive.”

Judge Hand responded that “I don’t see how you lads can duck it.”

But Justice Frankfurter was unpersuaded.

“I shall work, within the limits of judicial decency,” he wrote, “to put off decision on miscegenation as long as I can.”

The Supreme Court did not strike down laws banning interracial marriage until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, when 16 states still had them on the books. That was almost two decades after the California Supreme Court in 1948 struck down a law making illegal “all marriages of white persons with Negroes” in Perez v. Sharp.

It has been just four years since the California Supreme Court, citing Perez, struck down two state laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman…

Read the entire article here.

Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

The New York Times
2012-11-29

Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — Jasmine Lee realizes just how Korean she’s become when she breaks out in the language, forgetting that her Filipino mother on the other end of the phone can’t understand her. But she is reminded of the limits of assimilation when Koreans, impressed by her fluency, comment: “You sound more Korean than Koreans do.”

Ms. Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen — and the first non-ethnic Korean — to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Her election reflected one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country’s modern history, a change Ms. Lee says “Koreans understand with their brain, but have yet to embrace with their heart.”

Only a decade ago, school textbooks still urged South Koreans to take pride in being of “one blood” and ethnically homogeneous. Now, the country is facing the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society. While the foreign-born population is still small compared with countries with a tradition of immigration, it’s enough to challenge how South Koreans see themselves.

“It’s time to redefine a Korean,” said Kim Yi-seon, chief researcher on multiculturalism at the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute. “Traditionally, a Korean meant someone born to Korean parents in Korea, who speaks Korean and has Korean looks and nationality. People don’t think someone is a Korean just because he has a Korean citizenship.”…

…One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although overall numbers of schoolchildren in South Korea have been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birth rates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.

“A multicultural society is not just coming; it’s already here,” Ms. Lee, a member of the governing Saenuri Party, said in an interview at her office in the National Assembly…

…“They bring religious and ethnic strife to our country, where we had none before,” said Kim Ky-baek, publisher of the nationalist Web site Minjokcorea and a critic of the government’s policy of admitting and providing social benefits to foreign-born brides and migrant workers. “They create an obstacle to national unification. North Korea adheres to pure-blood nationalism, while the South is turning into a hodgepodge of mixed blood.”

The challenge for South Korea is whether it can “redefine the nation, embracing people who do not share the same blood into a broader Koreanness,” said Chung Ki-seon, senior researcher at the IOM Migration Research and Training Center…

…And this year, for the first time, South Korea began accepting multiethnic Korean citizens into its armed forces. Previously, the military had maintained that a different skin color would make them stand out and hurt unity…

Read the entire article here.

Bolivia’s Census Omits ‘Mestizo’ as Category

The New York Times
2012-11-21

The Associated Press

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia is under a virtual curfew as census-takers count and classify the landlocked Andean nation’s population in its first census in 11 years.

Stirring controversy was the government decision not to include “mestizo” as a category of ethnicity.

People have the option of declaring themselves members of one of 40 ethnic groups, including Afro-Bolivians. But “mestizo,” or mixed-race, is not an option. Critics of President Evo Morales say he is afraid people won’t identify themselves with a particular indigenous group, thus delegitimizing the government…

Read the entire article here.

Political Racism in the Age of Obama

The New York Times
2012-11-10

Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania

The white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era.

But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and may in fact have been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved…

…By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.

The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

A Spectrum From Slaves to Saints (Art Review)

The New York Times
2012-11-08

Holland Carter, Staff Art Critic

“The Three Mulattoes of Esmereldas” (1599) is one of the works in “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. More Photos

‘African Presence in Renaissance Europe,’ at Walters Museum

BALTIMORE — In a fall art season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer diet served up by Manhattan’s major museums, you have to hit the road for grittier fare. And the Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it in a high-fiber, convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe.”

Visually the exhibition is a gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered — Dürer, Rubens, Veronese — along with images most of us never knew existed. Together they map a history of art, politics and race that scholars have begun to pay attention to — notably through “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a multivolume book project edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — but that few museums have addressed in full-dress style.

Like the best scholarship, the Walters show, organized by Joaneath Spicer, the museum’s curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, is as much about questions as answers, and makes no bones about that. Many wall labels begin with an interrogative, suggesting that a museum visitor’s reading of a particular image carries as much weight as the curator’s…

…Being a domestic slave in urban Europe was not necessarily a lifelong condition. (The situation was very different on New World plantations.) Slaves could be freed by owners and take up independent professions. The two black men, one young, one older, in a pair of fleet chalk drawings from around 1580 by Paolo Veronese might have worked as his assistants or apprentices, much as the former slave and mixed-race painter Juan de Pareja did in Velázquez’s studio in Madrid.

De Pareja went on to have a painting career of his own, though he is largely remembered as the subject of one of Velázquez’s most magnificent portraits. But in general the names of black sitters in Renaissance paintings — and, no doubt, of black artists — are lost.

Who is, or was, the slightly stunned-looking man wearing drop earrings, a gold chain and pearl-encrusted cap in “Portrait of a Wealthy African,” by an unknown 16th-century German or Flemish artist? Or the regal-looking personage, head swathed in a milk-white turban, in an oil sketch whipped up on a sheet of repurposed accounting paper by Peter Paul Rubens?

Rubens’s sitter is so attractive, we’d love to know his story. And we’d especially love to know the story — the true, gossip-free story — behind the sitter in an Agnolo Bronzino portrait whose name has survived. He’s Alessandro de’ Medici, who ruled Florence for seven years before being assassinated in 1537, and who is thought by historians to have been the illegitimate child of a pope-to-be, Clement VII, and a black or biracial woman.

Alessandro’s dark skin was remarked on by contemporaries, who nicknamed him Il Moro (the Moor), a generic term for African in 16th-century Italy. In Bronzino’s painting the subject’s complexion is inconclusively ruddy. But another portrait, this one of the ruler’s young daughter Giulia, has been cited by some scholars, who point to the child’s black facial features, as confirmation of Alessandro’s ethnic heritage.

Together these portraits probably attest to the reality of African DNA flowing through Medici blood, and through the very center of the European High Renaissance. But they are at least as interesting for the reactions they have provoked. Until recently art history has ignored, denied or at best tiptoed around their racial content, just as it has skimmed over the black presence in Europe as a whole. The Walters exhibition not only asserts that presence, but positions it as a contributing factor to a crucial moment in the forming of European cultural identity…

Read the entire article here.  View the slide show here.

Justices to Revisit Voting Act in View of a Changing South

The New York Times
2012-11-09

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Correspondent

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the signature legacies of the civil rights movement.

Three years ago, the court signaled that part of the law may no longer be needed, and the law’s challengers said the re-election of the nation’s first black president is proof that the nation has moved beyond the racial divisions that gave rise to efforts to protect the integrity of elections in the South.

The law “is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp,” said Edward P. Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, a small legal foundation that helped organize the suit.

Civil rights leaders, on the other hand, pointed to the role the law played in the recent election, with courts relying on it to block voter identification requirements and cutbacks on early voting.

“In the midst of the recent assault on voter access, the Voting Rights Act is playing a pivotal role beating back discriminatory voting measures,” said Debo P. Adegbile, the acting president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the law, expected by June, could reshape how elections are conducted…

Read the entire article here.

Divided U.S. Gives Obama More Time

The New York Times
2012-11-06

Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg

Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.

In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near sweep of the battleground states, and was holding a narrow advantage in Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney narrowed as the night wore along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 electoral votes.

A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago when the television networks began projecting him as the winner at 11:20 p.m., even as the ballots were still being counted in many states where voters had waited in line well into the night. The victory was far narrower than his historic election four years ago, but it was no less dramatic…

…Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of the nation’s first black president into a second term. His path followed a pattern that has been an arc to his political career: faltering when he seemed to be at his strongest — the period before his first debate with Mr. Romney — before he redoubled his efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory…

Read the entire article here.

Han Suyin Dies; Wrote Sweeping Fiction

The New York Times
2012-11-05

Margalit Fox

Han Suyin, a physician and author known for writing the sweeping novel that became the Hollywood film “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and for her outspoken championing of China under Mao Zedong, died on Friday at her home in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As with many aspects of Dr. Han’s life, the precise year of her birth is uncertain, but she was believed to have been 96. Her granddaughter, Karen Shepard, confirmed the death.

The daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, Dr. Han was born and reared in China but wrote primarily in English and French. In more than two dozen books, including novels, a multivolume memoir and laudatory biographies of Mao and Zhou Enlai, she had the singular task, during the 1950s and afterward, of simultaneously explaining China to the West and the West to China…

…Dr. Han was born on Sept. 12, most likely in 1916, her granddaughter said — not in 1917, as has been reported over the years. The city of her birth is uncertain: it may have been Xinyang, in the Henan Province. Her parents eventually settled in Beijing, where she grew up.

At birth, Dr. Han was given the Chinese name Kuang-Hu Chou; she was also known early on by a Western name believed to have been Rosalie Matilda Chou, though she preferred to call herself Elizabeth. (At the start of her writing career she took the pen name Han Suyin, which she liked to translate as “a common little voice.”)

Growing up as a mixed-race child, Dr. Han later said, she felt she had a foot in each of two words but a secure footing in neither. Her mother, she told The New York Times in 1985, caustically referred to her as “the yellowish object.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Han Suyin’s Many-Splendored World

The New York Times
1985-01-25

Georgia Dullea

Being remembered as the author of  ”A Many-Splendored Thing,” the semiautobiographical love story of a Eurasian physician and a British journalist in Hong Kong, which inspired a sentimental movie and an even more sentimental song, is a bore, says Han Suyin, 33 years and 16 books after the fact.

In this country, “they still identify me with Jennifer Jones and that song,” the 68-year-old Dr. Han said with a weary smile, ”and I do get bored because, well, I’ve done other things.”

Dr. Han, who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, was sitting in her pied-à-terre on Beekman Place, drinking beer from a china mug and reflecting on change – both in China and in her own mind.

“I’m a person who changes, who adapts,” she said. “It’s because of my avidity for learning. If tomorrow you prove to me something new, I’ll be quite willing to overturn my ideas because ideas are made to be overturned.”

Exploring Two Cultural Identities

Born in Peking of a Chinese father and Belgian mother, Dr. Han has devoted her literary career to exploring her two cultural identities and to explaining East to West. “Instead of remaining torn and frayed, as so many other people, I come together and now both my worlds have come together,” she said, pressing one palm on the other. “To be quite honest, I was not very happy in a world where China and the West were at odds”…

Read the entire article here.