Mixed Race Studies

Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen: review

The Telegraph
2013-01-29

Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders delves into Deborah Cohen’s ‘Family Secrets‘

As former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan put it so memorably at the Leveson Inquiry, “Privacy is for paedos”. In part, this was no more than a tabloid journalist using words carelessly. If he had said secrecy, not privacy, was for “paedos”, the response would surely have been more muted, for post-Freud, secrecy is viewed as something entirely negative, whereas privacy is a right, enshrined in law.

Historian Deborah Cohen, whose previous book investigated how the British lived with their possessions, now explores how they lived with their ideas.

What did families try to hide, from 18th-century Britons in India, to suburbanites in the 20th century? In the 19th century, it was a truism that families should have no secrets from each other, even as they presented an impenetrable façade to the world. Family Secrets explores, via dozens of illuminating stories culled from the divorce-courts, adoption agencies and institutes for the mentally impaired, among others, how the world changed into a place where everybody tells everyone everything, from therapists to reality television.

By the early 19th century, there were 20,000-odd British men in India, mostly unmarried; over half the children baptised in one Calcutta church were both illegitimate and mixed race. Everyone knew about mixed-race relationships in India, but what happened when the men went home? Sometimes the children were brought back by their fathers, their mothers, referred to in legal documents as “old servants”, left behind. Sometimes the children themselves created elaborate back-stories: Anna Leonowens, the author of the autobiography that became The King and I, fabricated her entire childhood in order to hide her mother’s mixed-race background…

Read the entire review here.

Harry L. Carrico, Virginia Supreme Court justice, dies at 96

The Washington Post
2013-01-28

Martin Weil

Harry L. Carrico, who sat for 42 years on the Virginia Supreme Court and wrote a decision on interracial marriage that was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in what was regarded as a civil rights milestone, died Sunday in Richmond. He was 96.

A family spokeswoman said his health had declined after a fall while on a cruise in December. He was a Richmond resident and died at the Virginia Commonwealth University medical center.

His tenure as a justice was among the longest in the history of the state. Even after he formally retired, he continued to hear cases as a senior judge and had been on the bench as recently as December…

…Justice Carrico’s best known opinion came in 1966. He wrote the ruling by which the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state law against interracial marriage. The case became known as Loving v. Virginia and was named for the mixed-race couple, Richard and Mildred Jeter Loving.

The Lovings had married in Washington in June 1958 but soon returned to their native Caroline County, a rural area between Richmond and Fredericksburg. At the time, about two dozen states, including Virginia, prohibited interracial marriage.

The Caroline County sheriff burst into the Lovings’ home that July, roused the couple from their bed and told them the District’s marriage certificate was invalid in Virginia. The Lovings were subsequently charged and prosecuted…

Read the entire obituary here.

When Half is Whole: Understanding Mixed Race Identities

Stanford University, Cypress North
Tresidder Union
459 Lagunita
2013-02-01, 12:00 PST (Local Time)

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Consulting Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine & Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity will discuss identity development in persons of mixed racial and national backgrounds.  This topic has particular appeal to those who are interracially married and have children who are racially mixed, as well as people of mixed race heritage or for parents who are raising children who are ethnically different from them.

Free and open to all faculty, staff, retirees, postdocs and their eligible dependents who are part of the Stanford University, SLAC, Stanford hospital and clinics, LPCH.

For more information, click here.

I think it’s important for everyone to know that neither racism nor race are stable or natural. Racism metastasizes and changes over time, changing the ways that race is thought about and implemented in the US. For the last few decades, the Census has been one way to try to observe and track the symptoms of racial inequalities. For example, we can use the data to determine whether a racial group is disproportionately imprisoned or denied access to equitable bank loans. Without such data, it’s difficult to demonstrate racist trends.

—Eric Hamako

Steven F. Riley, “A Conversation with Eric Hamako,” MixedRaceStudies.org, (January 23, 2013). http://www.mixedracestudies.org/?p=27794.

Anti-Miscegenation Movement

Columbus Enquirer-Sun
Columbus, Georgia
1886-09-24
page 5, column 3

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

Organization In Louisiana to Prevent the Intermarriage of Whites and Blacks

New Orleans. September 20.—A practical movement has been inaugurated in Bossier parish, in this state, for the abolition of miscegenation. There have been during the past year or so several spasmodic efforts in this direction, both in Louisiana and Mississippi. Self-constituted vigilance committees have warned white men with negro wives and mistresses to leave them and lead a regular life, and when this failed have ridden through the parish, severely whipping both men and women who disobeyed this order.  In Mississippi there were several arrests, convictions and sentences for violation of the law prohibiting intermarriages between the races, and in Louisiana one man was severely cut in a scrimmage arising from this movement. But these anti-miscegenation raids were spasmodic, the freaks of a few wild young men. The present movement is more serious and more general, and is a thorough and practical organization, like that of the prohibitionist, to break up miscegenation.

The first meeting was held in Bossier parish in July, whore the subject was generally discussed, and adjourned over to this month to find the drift of public opinion. It was found that public sentiment among the whites was well nigh unanimous on the subject. The recent meeting held at Cottage Grove, in the upper portion of Bossier parish, was the result. There was no secrecy or mystery about it. It was an open mass meeting, in which all the people of the neighborhood—farmers, clergymen and others—assembled. The meeting was opened with prayer and presided over by a clergyman. The resolutions were of the strongest character. Those guilty of miscegenation were threatened with social boycott, and warned that they were insulting the race feelings and moral principles of the community. But the gist of the meeting was the appointment of a vigilance committee of nineteen to serve notices on these white men living with negro women—the vigilants were not instructed as to what they should if this warning is unheeded—and the appointment of another committee to assist in the organization of anti-miscegenation societies in other parishes in the state.

This plan of operation is warmly supported by the press. The Bossier Banner declares that race purity must be preserved at all hazards, the line must be sharply and distinctly drawn, and those who cross it must pay the penalty. The Robeline Reporter of Natchitoches, edited by the father of the present attorney-general of the state, approves the idea.

As this sentiment prevails in most of the neighboring parishes, it is thought that the present organization, by giving a start to the anti-miscegenation sentiment, which in this part of the state is now stronger than the anti-liquor sentiment, it will spread through north Louisiana if not into the neighboring states of Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas. There is no law in Louisiana against the intermarriage or cohabitation of f[r]aces, this prohibition, which was strongly urged by many persons, being voted down in the late constitutional convention, but miscegenation is growing rarer every day, in deference to the strong public sentiment on this point.

Intertextual Links: Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

College Literature
Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2013
pages 121-138
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2013.0004

Robin Miskolcze, Associate Professor of English
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

Though literary critics of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man convincingly regard the novel as reminiscent of the slave narrative, few readers have considered the scope and significance of Johnson’s reference to a major best-selling literary predecessor: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Johnson’s explicit reference to Stowe’s 1852 novel early in his story solicits a reading of the intertextual links between the two novels. Specifically, I explore how Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s Uncle Tom are connected by the symbol of the coin necklace, a gift from white men that carries a paternalistic force. In addition to Uncle Tom, I also analyze the similarities between Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s biracial character, Adolph. Comparing Johnson’s and Stowe’s narrative choices for their biracial characters illustrates the trajectory of cultural politics involved in defining race and normative sexuality from the pre-Civil War years to the early twentieth century.

Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency, 2nd Edition

Routledge
292 pages
2012-12-17
Pages: 296
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-64536-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-64538-6

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Georgia State University

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A & M University

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama’s historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama’s service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama’s presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama’s presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. White Racial Framing and Barack Obama’s First Campaign
• Chapter 2. “Too Black?” Or “Not Black Enough?”
• Chapter 3. From Susan B. Anthony to Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 4. The Cool Black Man vs. The Fist-Bumping Socialist
• Chapter 5. The Dr. Jeremiah Wright Controversy
• Chapter 6. The 2008 Primaries and Voters of Color
• Chapter 7. November 4, 2008 : A Dramatic Day in U.S. History
• Chapter 8. “Post-Racial” America?
• Chapter 9. President Obama’s 2009-2013 Term and the 2011-2012 Primaries
• Chapter 10. The 2012 National Election
• Endnotes
• Index

Beyond Selma-to-Stonewall

The New York Times
2013-01-27

By including gay rights in the arc of the struggle for civil rights — the road “through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — President Obama linked his presidency to ending antigay discrimination and underscored the legal wrong of denying gay people the freedom to marry.

 “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” Mr. Obama famously said in his second Inaugural Address, “for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Now that Mr. Obama has declared that he believes denying gay people the right to wed is not only unfair and morally wrong but also legally unsupportable, the urgent question is how he will translate his words into action. To start, he should have his solicitor general file a brief in the Proposition 8 case being argued before the Supreme Court in March, saying that California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional…

…ust a day after the inauguration, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said that while Mr. Obama supports same-sex marriage as a policy matter, the president still believes it is an issue for individual states to decide. That was Mr. Obama’s formulation when he first announced his support for same-sex marriage in May, and even then it made no sense, except perhaps as political cover approaching the general election campaign.

Marriage is traditionally regulated by the states, but there are constitutional limits on what states may do. The Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia prevented states from forbidding marriages between interracial couples like Mr. Obama’s own parents…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

With Obama, not a post-racial nation, but something more complex

The Washington Post
2013-01-21

Marc Fisher, Staff Writer

The huge oil painting propped up on a bridge table at 13th and F streets NW was arresting enough to stop people even as they hurried toward the Mall. There they were, heroes of black America, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Shakur, Huey Newton and Barack Obama, all on horseback in a classic Western tableau.

One after another, potential customers, almost all of them black, stepped up to inspect the painting and the $20 prints of it that were for sale Monday. Then they did a double take, because the couple selling the prints, Corey Francis and Kelly Allen, were white.

Francis pointed to the center of the painting, to a convincing likeness of the president: “That’s Will Smith, isn’t it?”

A suspicious silence fell over his black customers — was the white guy making fun or having fun? And then Francis smiled, they all cracked up, and three more Obama supporters bought a print.

On the day the nation witnessed the second swearing-in of the first black president, race mattered, as it has at every turn throughout American history. But blacks and whites along the Mall and the parade route, as well as others across the land, say it matters in different ways at the midpoint of this historic presidency…

Read the entire article here.