Whiteness has its privileges, among which is the privilege to be taken seriously as an intellectual&#8230;

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…This depiction of Alice [Jones Rhinelander] fell squarely into a white tradition of depicting mulatto women as sexually available, sexually victimized, and/or sexually predatory. By the 1920s many white Americans, particularly northern whites, joined African Americans in blaming southern white men for the existence of the substantial mulatto population that now (supposedly) threatened the racial purity of white America both by its very presence and by the behaviour—particularly the sexual behavior—of its members. Indeed, northern white writers continued to be fascinated with the supposed rituals of white-male-controlled interracial sex in the South, particularly exclusive “octoroon balls” at which light-skinned African American women competed to be the mistress of socially elite white men who would support them financially in return for sex and companionship, all in the name of romance. Such depictions, however, painted the women as desperately competing for their shared goal: a rich white lover. By the 1920 images of mulatto women focused even more directly on their supposed obsession with “landing,” either as a wife or a mistress, a rich white benefactor—and on using that liaison to appropriate white money, property, and even power…

Lewis, Earl and Heidi Adrizzone. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. New York: W. W. Norton. 2002. Pages 166-167.

Whiteness has its privileges, among which is the privilege to be taken seriously as an intellectual…

Whiteness has its privileges, among which is the privilege to be taken seriously as an intellectual, to be seen as the model patron of a library, the rightful inhabitant of a university campus, never to be viewed as a security risk to other students for his mere presence there.

Ann M. Little, “Who’s telling who to STFU at American universities? Observations on teaching at a HWCU.” Historiann: History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present, November 21, 2015. http://historiann.com/2015/11/21/whos-telling-who-to-stfu-at-american-universities-observations-on-teaching-at-a-hwcu/.

Tags: Ann Little, Ann M. Little, Historiann

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2015 at 02:46Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Mixed Race Studies

Whiteness has its privileges, among which is the privilege to be taken seriously as an intellectual…

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta