Mixed Race Studies

Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

University of Massachusetts Press
July 2002
296 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-341-7
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55849-417-6

James M. O’Toole, Clough Professor of History
Boston College, Boston, Massachusets

• An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
• Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award

The remarkable saga of a mixed-race family in nineteenth-century America

Through the prism of one family’s experience, this book explores questions of racial identity, religious tolerance, and black-white “passing” in America. Spanning the century from 1820 to 1920, it tells the story of Michael Morris Healy, a white Irish immigrant planter in Georgia; his African American slave Eliza Clark Healy, who was also his wife; and their nine children. Legally slaves, these brothers and sisters were smuggled north before the Civil War to be educated.

In spite of the hardships imposed by American society on persons of mixed racial heritage, the Healy children achieved considerable success. Rejecting the convention that defined as black anyone with “one drop of Negro blood,” they were able to transform themselves into white Americans. Their unlikely ally in this transition was the Catholic church, as several of them became priests or nuns. One brother served as a bishop in Maine, another as rector of the Cathedral in Boston, and a third as president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who became nuns, one was appointed the superior of convents in the United States and Canada. Another brother served for twenty years as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard, enforcing law and order in the waters off Alaska.

The Healy children’s transition from black to white should not have been possible according to the prevailing understandings of race, but they accomplished it with apparent ease. Relying on their abilities, and in most cases choosing celibacy, which precluded mixed-race offspring, they forged a place for themselves. They also benefited from the support of people in the church and elsewhere. Even those white Americans who knew the family’s background chose to overlook their African ancestry and thereby help them to “get away” with passing.

By exploring the lifelong struggles of the members of the Healy family to redefine themselves in a racially polarized society, this book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the enduring dilemma of race in America.

View a 58 minute-long discussion from 2002-12-04 with the author here.

Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

The American Historical Review
2005
Volume 110, Number 2

Saliha Belmessous, Research Fellow of History
University of Syndey

Although the idea of race is increasingly being historicized, its emergence in the context of French colonization remains shadowy. This is despite the fact that colonization was central to the emergence of race in French culture. The French are either credited with a generous vision and treatment of Amerindians or they are kept in limbo. The publication of Richard White’s Middle Ground in 1991 shook up these conventional ideas by showing that French conciliation toward indigenous peoples had to be explained by particular political and economic factors rather than by national character. Yet the issue of race has remained almost untouched, and French America has still not taken its place in the current debate about race, color, and civility.

The present essay is an empirical contribution to the discussion on the origins of European racialism as applied to colonial situations. It argues that racial prejudice in colonial Canada emerged only after an assimilationist approach had been tried for almost a century and had failed. In the seventeenth century, French policy toward the indigenous peoples of New France relied on the assimilation of the natives to French religion and culture. The aim was to mix colonial and native peoples in order to strengthen the nascent New France. This policy of francisation (sometimes translated as “Frenchification”) was based on a paternalistic vision of cultural difference: the French officials viewed the Amerindians as “savages,” socially, economically, and culturally inferior to the Europeans. As such, they had to be educated and brought to civility. This policy remained the official “native policy” employed throughout the period of the French regime in Canada despite the internal tensions and contradictions displayed by French officials. Historians have traditionally emphasized the implementation of this policy by missionaries and, consequently, have neglected or, at best, diminished the significance of francisation for civil authorities. The conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was undoubtedly an important part of the policy of francisation, but that importance has been overstated: francisation was more a political program than a religious one. An understanding of the central role played by the state in the promotion of the policy of assimilation has profound consequences for our comprehension of the relations between the French and Amerindians…

Read the entire article here.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law

University of North Carolina Press
December 2009
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3318-6
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-0727-6

Fay Botham, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies
University of Iowa

In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion–specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race–had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War.

Botham argues that divergent Catholic and Protestant theologies of marriage and race, reinforced by regional differences between the West and the South, shaped the two pivotal cases that frame this volume, the 1948 California Supreme Court case of Perez v. Lippold (which successfully challenged California’s antimiscegenation statutes on the grounds of religious freedom) and the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (which declared legal bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional). Botham contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God “dispersed” the races, as opposed to the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins, points to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminates the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements.

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century

Carolina Academic Press
2009
160 pp
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59460-571-0
LCCN: 2009001612

Earl Smith, Professor of Sociology and Rubin Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies
Wake Forest University

Angela J. Hattery, Professor of Sociology
Wake Forest University

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century is a unique set of essays—both personal and research based—that explore a variety of issues related to interracial couplings in the 21st Century United States. Edited by Earl Smith and Angela Hattery, professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, this volume brings together the leading scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities who explore interracialities.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics related to navigating interracial relationships, including a chapter by George Yancey and colleagues that focuses on the tensions around interracial relationships in conservative Christian churches, to the role that racism and patriarchy play in shaping intimate partner violence among interracial couples—Smith and Hattery’s own contribution. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey A. Laszloffy focus on the children of interracial unions and their attempts to negotiate a racial identity. Wei Ming Dariotis uses a personal narrative to explore the discourse and cooption of the term “Hapa” by a variety of Asian Americans. And, Amy Steinbugler offers an examination of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in her chapter on interracial, same sex couples. Other contributors include Kellina M. Craig-Henderson, Emily J. Hubbard and Amy Smith.

In light of the recent election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, himself a bi-racial individual living in a multi-racial family, this book could not be more timely.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments

Exploring the Pastoral Dynamics of Mixed-Race Persons

Pastoral Psychology
Volume 52, Number 4 (March 2004)
Pages 315-328
DOI: 10.1023/B:PASP.0000016936.79800.89

Peter Yuichi Clark, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care
American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, California

The number of persons in the United States who identify with more than one racial group is a steadily growing segment of the larger population. Yet pastoral care literature has not focused much attention to date on the spiritual care of multiracial people in America. This article intends to begin that conversation by examining their intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, suggesting four directions of caring, and then exploring five implications for offering compassionate and relevant ministry.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown

The Journal of American History
Volume 91, No. 1
June 2004
pp. 119–144

Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History
University of Chicago

The religious history of the civil rights movement is strangely one-sided. “God was on our side,” the activists have said, and scholars have tended to agree. But the opponents of civil rights also used religion in their cause. Jane Dailey argues that historians have underestimated the role of religion in supporting segregation as well as in dismantling it. Viewing the civil rights movement as a contest over Christian orthodoxy helps explain the arguments made by both sides and the strategic actions they took. Dailey examines the connections among antimiscegenation anxiety, politics, and religion to reveal how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregation ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow.

…This article explores how religion served as a vessel for one particular language crucial to racial segregation in the South: the language of miscegenation. It was through sex that racial segregation in the South moved from being a local social practice to a part of the divine plan for the world. It was thus through sex that segregation assumed, for the believing Christian, cosmological significance. Focusing on the theological arguments wielded by segregation’s champions reveals how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregationist ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow. It also demonstrates that religion played a central role in articulating not only the challenge that the civil rights movement offered Jim Crow but the resistance to that challenge…

…Although rebutted at the time and later, Ariel’s argument remained current through the middle of the twentieth century, buttressed along the way by such widely read books as Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and The Tempter of Eve (1902), both of which considered miscegenation the greatest of sins. Denounced for its acceptance of separate creations, The Negro a Beast was nonetheless enormously influential. Recalling the door-to-door sales campaign that brought the book to the notice of whites across the South, a historian of religion lamented in 1909 that “during the opening years of the twentieth century it has become the Scripture of tens of thousands of poor whites, and its doctrine is maintained with an appalling stubbornness and persistence.” In this tradition, miscegenation—or, more commonly, amalgamation or mongrelization—was the original sin, the root of all corruption in humankind.

The expulsion from Paradise did not solve the problem of miscegenation. By the time of Noah race mixing was so prevalent that, in the words of one civil rights–era pamphleteer, “God destroyed ‘all flesh’ in that part of the world for that one sin. Only Noah was ‘perfect in his generation’ … so God saved him and his family to rebuild the Adamic Race.” That perfection did not last long, however; according to some traditions, the cursed son of Ham, already doomed to a life of servitude, mixed his blood with “pre-Adamite negroes” in the Land of Nod. Again and again God’s wrath is aroused by the sin of miscegenation, and the people feel the awful weight of his punishment: Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for this sin, as was the Tower of Babel, where, in a failed effort to protect racial purity, God dispersed the peoples across the globe. King Solomon, “reputed to be the wisest of men, with a kingdom of matchless splendor and wealth was ruined as a direct result of his marrying women of many different races,” and the “physical mixing of races” that occurred between the Israelites and the Egyptians who accompanied Moses into the wilderness “resulted in social and spiritual weakness,” leading God to sentence the Exodus generation to die before reaching the Promised Land. For evidence that the God of Noah remained as adamantly opposed to racial mixing as ever, white southern believers could look back a mere fifteen years to the Holocaust. The liquidation of six million people was caused, D. B. Red explained in his pamphlet Race Mixing a Religious Fraud (c. 1959), by the sexual “mingling” of the Jews, who suffered what Red represents as God’s final solution to the miscegenation problem: “Totally destroy the people involved.” Here, surely, was proof that segregation was “divine law, enacted for the defense of society and civilization…

Read the entire article here.