Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy
WITH INGRID DINEEN-WIMBERLY
I am pointing to the moon with my finger in order to show it to you.
Why do you look at my finger and not at the moon?
—Shinran (thirteenth-century founder of Pure Land Buddhism), Collected Works of Shinran
When Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and I were asked to contribute an essay to a book on multiraciality and social class, it seemed a good idea. It offered the chance to try to deal with class and race together, something that we had been hoping to do in a theoretical way. We are historians; the other seventeen contributors were sociologists or nearby sorts of social scientists. The social scientific project yearns to discover what are presumed to be the constant, underlying, universal laws of human behavior—something like Plato’s ideal types. In pursuit of that discovery, social scientists make models and test them, trying to get ever closer to the master model they believe lies beneath the surface of human experience. That is what we perceived the other authors in the volume to be doing, and it struck Ingrid and me as slightly wide of the mark. Both this essay and chapter 13 describe my unease with the model-making aspect of social scientific inquiry. As historians, Ingrid and I tend to ask descriptive rather than hypothesis-driven questions first. We work outward from the stories of particular humans’ lives. We construct generalizations, to be sure, but we are wary of proclaiming universal laws of human behavior, and we find that models often obscure as much as they enlighten. We are grateful to Kathleen Korgen, the editor of the book, for her initial invitation, for many insightful suggestions, and for her personal grace as our essay took on a shape she may not initially have envisioned.
This essay is a meditation on the usefulness of models or typologies for understanding racial hierarchy and social class, and specifically the racial and class positioning of multiracial people of various sorts and in various contexts. We begin by examining five models that have been put forward regarding racial hierarchy and the social positioning of multiracial people. Each describes a particular social and historical context; each has an argument about that context that may seem plausible to some advocates; and each has flaws that stand out to other onlookers. Each helps us see some things, even as it obscures others. In the second half of this essay, we will consider another model: the one-drop rule, and its corollary assumption that it has always been advantageous in social class terms for racially mixed people who could “pass” as White to do so. We find that model—and in particular, its corollary theory about class mobility—leaves something to be desired. That, in turn, may cast doubt on the class assumptions of some of the other models we examine in the first part of the essay.
The first typology is the idea espoused by Susan R. Graham, Charles Byrd, Newt Gingrich, Ward Connerly, and a few other activists that multiraciality necessarily is a good thing because it constitutes a move toward a postracial social order.1 A leader in this vector of assertion is Graham, who has pushed the notion that the creation of a multiracial category for people of mixed ancestry is a step toward a happy future day when the United States will be “post racial[,] … [when] we have finally, gone beyond race, transcended it, and have become … color-blind.”2
Newt Gingrich, spasmodically the darling of the Republican Party, in June 2007 spoke in favor of multiracialism as a step toward stopping all talk about race:
[We need to take] action of the sort which will dramatically change people’s lives. Let me now suggest 10 practical steps which, started today can build a better America and, in the process, close the racial divide: …
RACIAL CLASSIFICATION—We must break down rigid racial classifications. A first step could be to add a “multiracial” category to the census and other government forms to begin to phase out the outdated, divisive, and rigid classification of Americans as “blacks” or “whites” or other single races. Ultimately, our goal is to have one classification—“American.”3
Susan Graham regarded Gingrich as one of the great friends of the multiracial movement as she understood it.4 Neither Graham nor Gingrich nor others like Ward Connerly, who made similar arguments, ever mentioned class in their campaigns for a particular version of multiraciality; they more or less pretended that class was not an issue. But it is worth pointing out that their individualistic ethic appealed mainly to middle- and upper-class Americans of whatever racial identity.
Racial conservatives, like Gingrich and Graham, who advocate multiraciality as a step toward a nonracial future have been the targets of a few writers like Rainier Spencer and Jared Sexton who oppose the very idea of a multiracial identity because they see the whole idea as tending in the direction that Graham and Gingrich advocate—toward a conservative-dream future where no one would ever talk about race again, and Black Americans would be left to rot.5 The problem, of course, is that Gingrich and Graham do not stand for the multiracial movement, neither its activists nor its scholars. The notion espoused by Spencer and Sexton, that the goal of a multiracial identity is to end all talk about race, is nonsense. Most serious students of the multiracial movement, like most activists (and unlike Graham and Gingrich), do not see the advocacy of a multiracial identity as a step toward not talking about race any more. Rather, they see it as a practical, sensible, and humane way of understanding the complex racial identities of a large and growing number of people in a world that is racially very complex. Nonetheless, it is true that for most multiracialists, as for Graham and Gingrich (and also for their critics Sexton and Spencer), the question of class position never really comes up.6
A second, sometimes popular typology in the realm of multiraciality is the Brazilian model of Mulatto upward mobility and racial harmony espoused by Gilberto Freyre and later modified by Thomas Skidmore and Carl Degler. Freyre contrasted the harsh US system of racial segregation in the first half of the twentieth century with what he described as a broad “racial democracy” in Brazil, with lots of social and marital mixing between two large racial groups, White and Black, and consequently lots of multiracial people. Degler saw this, not as simple racial harmony across Brazil’s entire population, but instead as a many-layered hierarchy of class, color, and racial mixture strung out between poor Blackness and rich Whiteness. He saw an attempt at upward mobility in the highlighting of one’s multiraciality, and he called this the “Mulatto escape hatch”—out of Blackness and toward semi-Whiteness. Skidmore took this line of thinking further, contending that the ultimate goal of all this was to support White hegemony by Whitening most of the population as much as possible, and observed that this giving in to the White ideal stunted any real move for Black racial uplift.7 More recently, G. Reginald Daniel and other critics have highlighted long-standing and pervasive Black-White racial conflict that Freyre, Degler, and even Skidmore’s models tended to obscure. They have discerned, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a move in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America toward a North American–style Black-White divide.8
A third typology is the Mexican and Central American model of mestizaje first articulated by José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos glorified Mexico’s population as la raza cósmica (the cosmic race), which he represented as a spiritual and biological blending of Castilian and Indian peoples whose very mixture made Mexico a more spiritual and vigorous nation than any other. Vasconcelos and those who followed his lead in other parts of Central America were trying to provide ideological foundations for nationhood in an ideology of racial mixedness. Yet, even as this formulation recognized and built upon the racial blending of Native and European, it denied the existence of African, Asian, or other roots in the national experiment. It obscured the existence (and low class position) of Black- and Asian-descended people, and it tended to erase the troubles of Native peoples themselves by pretending they all were mestizos.9
Fourth, we turn to the idea pursued by George Yancey, that the US racial order is currently moving to a two-category, Black/non-Black division. Yancey believes that, in the not too distant future, Asian and Latino Americans will assimilate more or less completely and become White people, in their own eyes and in the eyes of other Americans, leaving only African-descended people as racial outsiders in American society (he doesn’t tell us what will happen to other racialized groups like Native or Arab Americans). Yancey’s vision has no room for multiracial people, except to imply that they should accept an uncomplicatedly monoracial Black identity. He writes:
The changing nature of race relations will result in the merging of nonblack racial minorities into the dominant culture…. [T]he processes of assimilation that characterize European ethnic groups are the same social forces that influence nonblack racial minorities today…. [W]e may eventually see the development of a society in which blacks are separated from all, or at least most, other racial groups—or a black/nonblack society…. The development of a black/nonblack society challenges the notion … that our future racial reality will include a multiracial community that fights for racial justice…. African Americans will soon find themselves relatively alone in their struggle for racial justice.10
Almost all serious students of Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans—or for that matter, of multiracial people—would simply disagree. Yancey offers very little evidence to support his argument, which seems to be based on little more than naked assertion. How ever, we should note that it is at least possible to infer a class critique from Yancey’s typology. That is, his permanently Black group does seem like a working-class or lumpen proletarian bunch of people, and the other people he calls non-Blacks seem to occupy middle-class or upper-class positions. One might presume that he is making a class argument using racial terminology and saying that there is no place in this class argument for the multiracial possibility.
Fifth and finally, we turn to the admittedly speculative typology put forward by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Embrick, which posits a subtler reconfiguration of American society than does Yancey: a three-part hierarchical division into White, Honorary White, and Collective Black. They write that “racial stratification in general and the rules of racial (re)cognition in the United States in particular are slowly coming to resemble those in Latin America.” Here is their “Preliminary Map of the Triracial System in the United States”:
Whites
Whites
New Whites (Russians, Albanians, etc.)
Assimilated white Latinos11
Some multiracials (white-looking ones)
Assimilated (urban) Native Americans
A few Asian-origin people
Honorary Whites
Light-skinned Latinos
Japanese Americans
Korean Americans
Asian Indians
Chinese Americans
Middle Eastern Americans
Most multiracials
Collective Black
Filipinos
Vietnamese
Laotians
Dark-skinned Latinos Blacks
New West Indian and African Immigrants
Reservation-bound Native Americans12
Again, as with Yancey, in Bonilla-Silva and Embrick’s model the bottom group—the Collective Black—looks like a social class grouping more or less, though one marked using racial terminology. Indeed, the authors find some of the evidence for their model in income data (along with survey data on racial self-classification, degrees of intergroup warmth, and stereotypes). A strength of this model is that it helps us to see some gross class dynamics among different racialized groups. Yet, leaving aside whether their characterization of Latin America is apt, their model has several other flaws, chiefly that its generalizations about the United States are far too sweeping. It suggests that all Chinese and Middle Eastern Americans, for example, are pretty well off and that no African Americans, African immigrants, or Filipinos are; this is far from the case. The model posits a high race/class position for “white-looking” multiracial people but no place at all for darker people who have multiple ancestries; this omission goes unexplained. It misses the very important class and political dynamics between so-called mixed bloods and full-bloods on many American Indian reservations. And the model positively misplaces the majority of urban Indians in class terms (many are among the poorest dwellers of cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, and Los Angeles). No one who has spent much time in the western United States could put a lot of faith in a model as superficial and stereotypical as this.
Each of these typologies helps us understand some important things about the ways that race and class have worked in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. So far we have described some of the distinctive contributions of each of these typologies and the things they help us see, even as we have offered a few gentle criticisms of their conclusions.
There are also important social dynamics that each model tends to obscure. For example, the Graham-Gingrich, Freyre-Degler-Skidmore, and Vasconcelos models suggest a far greater degree of racial harmony than actually has been the case in the three societies—the United States, Brazil, and Mexico—that they purport to describe. Vasconcelos, for example, describes the Mexican people as a triumphant blend of Castilian and Indian peoples while ignoring the very large quantum of African ancestry in the Mexican population and enduring racial and class discrimination against people with African ancestry, as well as the small but significant numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, and others.13
The Brazilian, Yancey, and Bonilla-Silva and Embrick typologies lay race out on a single Black-to-White racial continuum (although Bonilla-Silva and Embrick do so with somewhat more sophistication). The simple Black-to-White linearity of these models suggests that one’s social position is a function of one’s degree of Whiteness, for one is always being measured in terms of one’s conformity to a White standard and proximity to White people. To the contrary, in both Brazil and the United States race has always been, from the sixteenth century to the present, not a bipolar continuum but a multipolar juxtaposition of several different racialized groups—always at least White, Black, and Red, and usually Brown and Yellow as well.14
With any model, it is easy for researchers, students, or policy makers to lose sight of the fact that it is a model, not the actual stuff of human experience. When a typology becomes reified—when people treat the model as if it were the real thing—danger of serious error creeps in. It is not the case that any of these is a complete representation of social experience. It is not the case that any of these—the Brazilian model, the White/Honorary White/Collective Black model, or any of the others (or for that matter, the one-drop rule)—in fact describes the central social experience of its time and place, compared to which individual examples may be seen as exceptions. Rather, such models are lenses that help us see certain things, even as they obscure other things.
FROM MODELS TO LIVES: THE ONE-DROP RULE AND ACTUAL SOCIAL EXPERIENCES
The one-drop rule, which is said by many commentators to have defined American race relations from sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century until past the middle of the twentieth, was a formal articulation of dominant ideas about how social relationships between White and Black (but not between White and Indian, White and Asian, White and Brown, Black and Brown, Asian and Black, Asian and Latino, or Black and Indian) people ought to be understood. The one-drop rule said that if one had “one drop of Black blood” (i.e., if one had a single known African-descended ancestor), then one was defined socially and legally as Black. Yet, even though the one-drop rule existed for a long time and had legal sanction in some places, it was only a social ideal. The actual social experience of racially mixed people in that era was much more complex.15
We want to explore some of that complexity, and we want to relate racial hierarchy to social class. To do this, we will look historically to the era of the one-drop rule, try to ascertain what shapes people’s lives actually took, and compare those lives with the One Drop typology. The remainder of our essay describes the lives of several people of racially mixed ancestry who made different racial and class moves at various times over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
There is a tendency in the study of mixed-race ethnicity to assume that individuals who could physically pass for White, and who chose to do so, did this in order to avoid racial discrimination or violence and to improve their life chances in social and economic terms. Many states, at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had laws that allowed those who had one quarter or less Black ancestry to sue to become legally White. Even irrespective of the law, many thousands of light-skinned people who had some Black ancestry passed into the White population.
The advantages that might accrue from taking on a White identity would seem obvious. Jean Toomer, author of Cane, a novella that helped launch the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, came from a family that had lots of White ancestors and a few Black ones. Of his grandfather’s several siblings, Toomer wrote, “Two … had left home … and were thereafter known as white. They had discarded a reputation less true to the racial facts for a reputation more true to the racial facts. They became in social fact what they so largely were in racial fact. Such an act, curiously enough, is called ‘passing.’ Speaking correctly, it would be much more accurate to say that my grandfather passed for a Negro, than to say that these brothers of his passed for white.”16
From a shifted vantage point, however, our research has uncovered pivotal times in US history when mixed-race individuals and communities aligned more with their African or Native heritage than with their European, and accrued tangible benefits on account of that choice. After the Civil War, because new positions in Black leadership became available in US politics, business, and government, many racially ambiguous people passed for Black (if we may echo Toomer’s phrase) and enjoyed a newfound upward mobility on account of their chosen Black identity. Among those in the next few generations whose physiognomies allowed them to choose, and who made the choice to be Black, were the pioneering Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune, the Reconstruction-era politician Blanche K. Bruce, the Progressive reformer Mary Church Terrell, the writer Alain Locke, the poet Langston Hughes, and the anti-lynching crusader Walter White, who led the NAACP for many years.17
We can see some of the complications of such matters in the lives and racial identity choices of the members of one family. For Belle da Costa Greene, passing from a Black identity to a White one indeed meant moving to a higher social class standing. Because her father was a well-known Black leader, she had to take on a new name in order to assume a White identity. This enabled her to apply for and win the position of director of the private library of J. P. Morgan, a White banker and at the time America’s richest man. This move to Whiteness and name change were necessary for her, even though Morgan and her Black father were acquaintances.18
Greene’s father, Richard T. Greener, had quite a different racial and career trajectory. Born a free man of color in Philadelphia in the 1840s, he associated with prominent abolitionists while still a teenager, and he attended Oberlin College, Phillips Academy, and Harvard, where he was remembered as the university’s first African American graduate. In the 1880s he was prominent enough as a Black man to be appointed secretary to the board of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument. For the next few decades he worked closely in Black politics with Booker T. Washington and other luminaries. He served as dean of Howard Law School and later as a US foreign diplomat. Then, for reasons that are obscure, Richard Greener removed himself from the ranks of Black leadership. In so doing, he also reduced his legacy and, consequently, his status. He disappeared from the historical record; critics said he took on a White racial identity.19
P. B. S. Pinchback moved the other direction in much the same era. At the start of the Civil War, Pinchback met only modest success as a White sergeant in the Union Army. Then, changing his racial identity, as a Black captain he commanded a company of troops. After the war, as a Black politician, he became the Reconstruction-era lieutenant governor and then governor of Louisiana; he was elected to both the US House of Representatives and the Senate; and he remained a powerful figure in African American politics throughout his life. Pinchback, in later conversations with his grandson Jean Toomer, did not fault his brothers for having chosen to pass for White, nor did he apologize for his own choice to pass for Black: “They had every right to be white. I have every right to be colored. They saw it to their advantage to do what they did. I saw it to my advantage to do what I did…. I realized I could make more head way if I were known as black…. Besides … I was more attached to our mother.”20
Fig. 12.2.
Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Just as racial politics after the Civil War opened up Black leadership opportunities for part Black multiracial people, so racial politics at various times in the nineteenth century made the choice of an Indian identity advantageous for multiracial people of mixed White and Native descent. John Ross was the dominant figure in Cherokee national politics throughout the middle third of the nineteenth century, elected principal chief of the tribe in every election from 1828 to 1860. He was the son of a Scotch father and a Cherokee mother. He achieved and maintained his leadership position, not because of his proximity to Whiteness on account of his paternity, but on account of his mother’s clan position within the Cherokee Nation. Among the Cherokee and other southeastern Indians, an individual’s identity and tribal membership were reckoned according to the social location of one’s maternal uncles. In another twist of racial hierarchy, even as Ross led a fierce defense of his people against the White invasion of Cherokee territory and the forcible removal of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, he also owned twenty slaves who produced the bulk of his personal wealth. When the Civil War came he tried to keep his tribe out of the conflict, though eventually they entered on the Confederate side.21
It is not that the lives of people such as Ross, Pinchback, Greener, and the other multiracial people who took on Black and Native identities and prospered were exceptions to a socially determinative one-drop rule. It is that the One Drop typology captures only certain features of the racial and class dynamics of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Social reality was far more complicated than the model. In similar fashion, for all that the other models—Graham’s romance of multiraciality as a path to a raceless future, Degler’s Mulatto escape hatch, Vasconcelos’s cosmic race, Yancey’s Black/non-Black divide, and Bonilla-Silva and Embrick’s triracial hierarchy—help us see certain possibilities and limits for multiracial people, we must remember that no model represents social reality fully. People’s lives are not defined by any of these six models, nor are their personal struggles and choices simply a function of a model—in accordance with it or exceptions to it. Rather, their lives are their lives; their struggles are their struggles; their choices are their choices. Sometimes the models can help us see some things about those lives and struggles and choices, but inevitably they tend to prevent us from perceiving other things that may be just as important.
Fig. 12.5.
Paramount chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation. Courtesy of the J. B. Milan Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Division.
We do not mean to say that typologies are not helpful. Each of them is a lens that can help us see some things. Sociological models are aimed at helping us see social structural issues, and they may help us define and pursue positive social ends. If we can make better lenses, then perhaps we can see things more clearly and comprehensively and in turn begin to make a more just society. So it is important to consider models of reality that other scholars make as guides to our thinking when that seems helpful, and perhaps as encouragements to make better models of our own. Yet we ought not imagine that this is a simple, linear process of building better and better models to get closer and closer to some imagined underlying reality, like ancient Greek sculptors trying to make images ever more like, not the human bodies they saw around them, but the ideal types that Platonic philosophy told them were superior to actual human frames.
Models are useful, but they are not all equal. Models that work in one place do not always work equally well in another place. The model that Soviet imperial scholars constructed to understand the peoples of Central Asia looks very different from the model constructed by British imperial scholars for understanding the peoples of southern Africa.22 What is more, in any single place, human life patterns shift over time, for, as the novelist L. P. Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”23 Things were different a hundred years ago than they are today; they will be different again in the future. And as we have seen, even in a single place and time—the United States at the recent turn of the century—different models may be constructed by people who wish to understand different aspects of a problem, or to pursue different sorts of outcomes, in this case the meaning and class implications of multiraciality.
Models are not magic; they must be used with care. The lens or typology or model is not the goal; it is a finger pointing in a direction that may help us see that goal. In the end, the loyalty of the authors of this chapter is not to models—sociological, philosophical, political, or any other sort—but to human lives as they have been lived and as they continue to be lived, in all their shifting complexity. We hope that the reader of this essay, of the other chapters in this book, and of other works of sociology will consider the models that are offered, learn from them, and then look beyond them for subtler shadings of insight than any model can give into the complex relationships that have existed between multiracial ancestry, racial identity choices, and social class.
NOTES
This essay appeared in Multiracial Americans and Social Class, ed. Kathleen Korgen (New York: Routledge, 2010), 205–21. I have made some corrections to errors that the copy editor of that book introduced and changed the reference format, but otherwise the essay is little changed from the original.
1. Charles Michael Byrd, Interracial Voice (magazine 1995–2003); Charles Michael Byrd, The Bhagavad-Gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness (Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme Books, 2007). On Connerly, see G. Reginald Daniel and Josef Manuel Castañeda-Liles, “Race, Multiraciality, and the Neoconservative Agenda,” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, ed. David L. Brunsma (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 125–45.
2. Susan Graham, “Is This President Obama’s Post-Racial America?,” January 20, 2009, Project RACE website, www.projectrace.com/fromthedirector/archive/012009_obama_post_racial_america.php (retrieved April 25, 2009). See also Susan R. Graham, “The Real World,” in The Multiracial Experience, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 15–36; Susan R. Graham, “Grassroots Advocacy,” in American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 185–90; www.projectrace.com.
3. Newt Gingrich, speech to the Orphan Foundation of America, June 27, 2007; on Gingrich’s website, newt.org/EditNewt/NewtNewsandOpinionDB/tabid/102/ArticleType/ArticleView/ArticleID/748/Default.aspx (retrieved April 25, 2009).
4. She wrote in 2001, after Gingrich had resigned from public office in the midst of personal scandal and rebellion in his own party, “He was on our side. The Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was in our corner. Now he has resigned…. At our first one-on-one meeting I quickly outlined the problem of multiracial children and adults without a racial classification. I handed Newt a bound report with the history of the movement and statistics. He quickly flipped through the report, put it aside and said, ‘This is the right thing to do for the children.’ He outlined what he would do to help—it was an impressive list. Newt Gingrich sent a personal letter to the Director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census on our behalf. Newt Gingrich repeatedly included us in speeches. Newt Gingrich spoke to educators about the multiracial classification…. Newt’s downfall was that he surrounded himself with the wrong people,” not that he had been forced to resign from his post as Speaker of the US House of Representatives in 1999 because of 84 charges of ethics violations, the loss of his leadership position in the house, a rebellion by House Republicans, and allegations of other improprieties. “Multiracial Life after Newt,” November 9, 2001, Project RACE website, www.projectrace.com/fromthedirector/archive/fromthedirector-110998.php (retrieved April 25, 2009).
5. Rainier Spencer, “Census 2000: Assessments in Significance,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 99–110; Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
6. For expositions of this view, see Maria P. P. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
7. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1956; orig. 1933); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, rev. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, orig. 1974).
8. G. Reginald Daniel, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
9. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; orig. 1979); Colin M. Mac-Lachlan and Jaime E. Rodriguez O., The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). For critiques, see Virginia Q. Tilley, “Mestizaje and the ‘Ethnicization’ of Race in Latin America,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2004), 53–68; and Marilyn Grace Miller, The Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). For reassertions of the concept, see Raphael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Peter Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 239–57.
10. George Yancey, “Racial Justice in a Black/Nonblack Society,” in Brunsma, Mixed Messages, 49–62. See also George Yancey, Who Is Black? Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). Yancey is also the editor, along with his wife, Sherelyn Whittum Yancey, of Just Don’t Marry One: Interracial Dating, Marriage, and Parenthood (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2003).
11. We assume they mean “White-looking Latinos.” We have no idea what “White Latinos” might be. Presumably these are lighter people than the “Light-skinned Latinos” in the second section, but one cannot know for sure.
12. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David G. Embrick, “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in America?,” in Brunsma, Mixed Messages, 33–48; see also Eileen O’Brien, The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asians Living beyond the Racial Divide (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
13. Daniel, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States; Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Stephen Small, “Mustefinos are White by Law: Whites and People of Mixed Racial Origins in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in Racial Thinking in the United States, ed. Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 60–79; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
14. See the references in note 13 above, and also Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006); Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007); Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
15. Spickard and Daniel, eds., Racial Thinking in the United States; F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Daniel, More than Black?; Matthew Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Winthrop D. Jordan, “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” ed. Paul Spickard, Journal of Critical Mixed-Race Studies 1 (2013): 98–132.
16. Jean Toomer Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, JWJ MSS. Series 1, b. 18: f. 493, handwritten draft of autobiography (Yale College of American Life, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT), 41.
17. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, “Mixed-Race Leadership in African America:
The Regalia of Race and National Identity in the US, 1862–1903” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009); Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862–1935” (unpublished MS).
18. The reader should note that Belle changed her surname by dropping the letter r in order to make her transition from Black to White. In the hope of affecting a Portuguese heritage, which might then explain her olive complexion, she added “da Costa.” The first official reference to Belle da Costa Greene (from her birth name, Marion Greener) was recorded in the US Census in 1900. See Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (New York: Norton, 2007). Compare the mobility experienced due to White connections or a White identity move in the lives of Amanda America Dickson and Anatole Broyard: Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1997); Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2008).
19. Allison Blakely, “Richard Theodore Greener and the ‘Talented Tenth’s’ Dilemma,” Journal of Negro History 59.4 (1974): 305–21; “Richard T. Greener: The First Black Harvard College Graduate,” in Blacks at Harvard, ed. Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 37–41; Michael Robert Mounter, “Richard Theodore Greener: The Idealist, Statesman, Scholar and South Carolinian” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2002). Compare the life trajectories of the novelists Nella Larsen and the young Jean Toomer: Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
20. Toomer draft autobiography, JWJ MSS. Series 1, b. 18: f. 493 (Beinecke Library), 30; James Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (New York: Macmillan, 1973). For a move in the direction of postracialism, compare the life of Philippa Schuyler and the later career of Jean Toomer: Kathryn Talalay, Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer; Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdieff (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
21. Gary E. Moulton, John Ross, Cherokee Chief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978); Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007; orig. 1939).
22. This is one of the major theoretical points in Paul Spickard, ed., Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2005). See especially Adrienne Edgar, “The Fragmented Nation: Genealogy, Identity, and Social Hierarchy in Turkmenistan,” 257–72; and T. Dunbar Moodie, “Race and Ethnicity in South Africa: Ideology and Experience,” 319–36.
23. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: Stein and Day, 1967; orig. 1953), 1; cf. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
