Mixed Race Studies

Oysters made Hampton man wealthy

Daily Press
Newport News, Virginia
2013-02-17

Mark St. John Erickson, Columnist

Even before the Civil War, Hampton’s busy waterfront boasted many free blacks who made their living as pilots, fishermen and boatmen.

Living side by side with whites who worked in the same maritime trades, they included such figures as Revolutionary War hero Cesar Tarrant, whose stand-out navigational skills and coolness under fire led the General Assembly to buy his freedom as a reward for “meritorious service.”

Tarrant was long dead when a light-skinned African-American boy named John Mallory Phillips came to Hampton in the 1860s. But the enterprise and independence he represented lived on in the tide of free blacks and ex-slaves who saw the opportunity to determine their own fates by taking to the water…

…Uncommon roots

Little was known about Phillips’ origins until his great-granddaughter Josephine C. Williams, a retired educator, began looking into her family’s past more than 15 years ago.

Scouring federal Census records, she found him listed first in 1860 as a 4-year-old child living in the York County household of a free black woman named Rachel Banks.

A decade later, Phillips shows up in the Hampton household of his uncle — a black oysterman named Cary Hopson — who owned his own home and reported several other oystermen from the Banks family living in his dwelling.

With his light skin and straight hair, Phillip’s appearance reflected the heritage of his father, a white York County farmer named John Phillips, and his light-skinned mother, whose mixed-race family reached far back into the colonial period, Williams says.

Whether Phillips was also related to white Hampton attorney, planter and Confederate officer Charles King Mallory — whose runaway slaves prompted Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler to give blacks refuge as “contraband of war” at nearby Fort Monroe — is debatable, she adds.

She also disputes the rumored link between the young freeman and Elizabeth City County planter Jefferson Curle Phillips, who commanded the local militiamen who burned Hampton in August 1861 to keep its buildings from being used by Union troops and the fast-growing population of fugitive slaves.

“I think it’s a coincidence,” Williams says, citing her Census documents as well as family lore.

“I don’t think there’s any relationship at all.”…

Read the entire article here.

More Thoughts on The Magic Mulatto Myth

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-01-29

Brett Russell Coleman

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the trope or myth of the magic mulatto (see the “about” page, for example, or this post about Frank Schaeffer). To my surprise, some people have asked me to expand on this myth (that is, I’m surprised that anyone reads any of this, but glad you do). Far be it from me to shirk my duty to my loyal readers, so expand I shall.

One of the ways in which this myth gets perpetuated is through research, scholarship, and sometimes everyday talk about mixed-race identity. In these discourses, you will often hear some clap-trap about mixed people being peculiarly skilled at “cultural adaptation” or “boundary spanning”, even “cognitive flexibility” (I’ve been guilty of this myself, I must admit, which is why I feel so free to criticize). It is clap-trap not because it isn’t or couldn’t be true (it may very well be true for some mixed-race people, under some circumstances), but because it could not possibly be true for all mixed-race people, or even some of them all of the time. It is especially ridiculous because it implies (perhaps inadvertently) that there is something magical about the intermingling of gene pools that predisposes one for cultural adaptation, as opposed to opportunities or demands of the sociocultural situation. More importantly, it implies that a “mixed-race” person would have an advantage over a “mono-racial” person in a similar sociocultural situation which demands the ability to “adapt” or “code-switch” or change like a “chameleon.” I suppose one could argue that familiarity with two or more racial or ethnic groups, plus a racially ambiguous appearance, might socialize one for this special ability in a way that is unlikely for a mono-racial person. I would argue that such an argument is absurd, but I suspect that neither you nor I am are temperamentally equipped for the conceptual and methodological nightmare that such a study would entail. So lets leave it at the level of argument for now. My argument is this: there is no good reason to believe that any given mixed-race person would be more adept at cultural adaptation, code switching, etcetera, than any given mono-racial person, given similar socializing conditions for both. That is to say, if the situation demands that the mono-racial person make some sort of psychological or behavioral leap across the racial or cultural boundary, he or she will be just as able to make that leap as the mixed-race person would be. To argue otherwise is to uphold the belief in “race” as something essential to the human “personality” and puts unfair demands on mixed-race people to do the hard work of bridging the racial divide that the majority of humanity are unwilling to do. Put another way, if you’re so interested in bridging the racial divide, do it yourself…

Read the entire article here.

Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of “Race”

Biological Theory
July 2012
12 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s13752-012-0048-0

Jonathan Michael Kaplan, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Oregon State University

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of California, Santa Cruz

It is illegitimate to read any ontology about “race” off of biological theory or data. Indeed, the technical meaning of “genetic variation” is fluid, and there is no single theoretical agreed-upon criterion for defining and distinguishing populations given a particular set of genetic variation data. By analyzing three formal senses of “genetic variation,” viz., diversity, differentiation, and heterozygosity, we argue that the use of biological theory for making claims about race inevitably amounts to a pernicious reification. Biological theory does not force the concept of “race” upon us; our social discourse, social ontology, and social expectations do. We become prisoners of our abstractions at our own hands, and at our own expense.

Read the entire article here.

Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama

City Lights Books
2009-01-15
120 pages
Paperback ISBN-10 0872865002; ISBN-13 9780872865006

Tim Wise

Race is, and always has been, an explosive issue in the United States. In this timely new book, Tim Wise explores how Barack Obama’s emergence as a political force is taking the race debate to new levels. According to Wise, for many whites, Obama’s rise signifies the end of racism as a pervasive social force; they point to Obama as a validation of the American ideology that anyone can make it if they work hard, and an example of how institutional barriers against people of color have all but vanished. But is this true? And does a reinforced white belief in color-blind meritocracy potentially make it harder to address ongoing institutional racism? After all, in housing, employment, the justice system and education, the evidence is clear: white privilege and discrimination against people of color are still operative and actively thwarting opportunities, despite the success of individuals like Obama.

Is black success making it harder for whites to see the problem of racism, thereby further straining race relations, or will it challenge anti-black stereotypes to such an extent that racism will diminish and race relations improve? Will blacks in power continue to be seen as an “exception” in white eyes? Is Obama “acceptable” because he seems “different than most blacks,” who are still viewed too often as the dangerous and inferior “other?”

All of these possibilities are explored in Between Barack and a Hard Place, by Tim Wise, one of the nation’s most prominent antiracist activists and educators and author of the critically-acclaimed memoir, White Like Me.

Contents

• Preface
• Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism
• The Audacity of Truth: A Call for White Responsibility
• Endnotes
• About the Author