To Sweeten Bitter

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Melissa Nobles, “History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000): 1738-1745.

To Sweeten Bitter

To Sweeten Bitter

Out-Spoken Press
2017-04-10
49 pages
8.5 x 0.4 x 5.5 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0993103872

Raymond Antrobus

Consider the name of Raymond Antrobus’ extraordinary collection of poems for a moment: To Sweeten Bitter. It’s a phrase of infinite possibility and tender worry, open and searching, wanting and volatile. And in this sense, it serves as a kind of secret refrain for us, a haunted current that charges after each line and image, each heart-fraught question (“you think you’re going / to go free?”) and tentative hope (“there is always enough time / in our lives to see / what we must see”). Here, a father laughs “you cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness” and a son reckons with all that might mean “in the scratched light” of history and the “turning / and the losing of myself.” Derek Walcott once reflected that “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer;” these poems— in all their urgent beauty—affirm that faith, embody it. —R.A. Villanueva

Tags: Out-Spoken Press, Raymond Antrobus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2017 at 02:16Z and is filed under Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Poetry, United Kingdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

To Sweeten Bitter

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