LITR 5731: Seminar in
American Multicultural Literature
Student Research Project
Karen Daniel
April 28, 2006
The Literary and Social Implications of
Passing and Crossing Inter-Racial Color Lines
Introduction:
In recent years, the ideas of inter-racial heritage and blending have become a sort of passion of mine. Growing up with the knowledge that I was adopted, and comfortable with the information I had been given about my racial and ethnic make-up, I had always maintained an active curiosity about “where I came from.” My parents had been led to believe that my racial make-up was a strongly European mixture of Irish, English, Dutch, and German, or, a perfectly Caucasian mix of European immigrant family history; how much more American could you get? But upon finding my birth parents a few years ago, the idea of passing and of privilege based on race came home in a very personal way for me. In fact I am 1/8 African American, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3/8 Native American, and the rest English; at least it was not all a total lie. Aside from the fact that I am one of the least ethnic looking people you will ever meet, the idea that the adoption agency was correctly informed of my heritage, yet presented false information to prospective adoptive parents, presumably to make me “more adoptable,” is a sobering thought. Over the years, as an education student, I have heard a lot about white privilege, but how much more personal could it get for me than to know that my parents, my upbringing, my very life and values, had been shaped, without my knowledge, by a decision that I would be better off as a white baby with white parents? Thus, began my fascination with this entire area of study.
I have written a couple of papers on passing and color lines, but I really want to expand my knowledge about the topic, and perhaps write my thesis on it. It is my hope that by doing my journal on this topic, I will not only expand my knowledge base, but also gain more focus about where I might want to go with my research, or for that matter, where I might not want to venture.
Since my major interest centers around the aspects of literature, and how minority authors use and/or address the ideas of racial blending, passing, and miscegenation, I will focus my research on particular authors and how they address these topics in their writings. I will look at African American authors and Mexican American authors, and how each of them speaks to the above topics.
I want to note that originally my intentions were to include Native American literature but I was unable to find any real material to address. I am sure it is out there, and I did find some useful essays that deal in small ways with the ideas of racial blending from the point of view of Native Americans, but for the purpose of this journal, the materials were too lacking to include. I am unsure about the reason for this and feel that it is the result of one of two factors. Perhaps the Native American culture is more assimilated into Euro-American culture than the other minorities we looked at, in part because they more closely emulate the majority culture physically. Or, more likely in my opinion, perhaps they do not have the same “respect” for whiteness as some other minority cultures. Due to differences in spirituality and culture, Native Americans do not necessarily see European Americans as privileged, but rather as sad and mis-led. The privileges may not be worth the price they would have to pay. But whatever the case, it is a difficult topic to research from a Native American point of view because the material is just not there in the same way it is for our other minority cultures.
African American
Authors
I had no problem finding material in the
canons of African American literature that discuss the issues I am interested
in. I began with our classroom
text, Slave Narratives.
Linda Brent; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: One cannot talk about racial blending without including the forced miscegenation of African Americans during the time of slavery. The interracial blending and “lightening” that resulted is still impacting the lives of the descendents of slaves who were forced into often violent sexual liaisons with white men. One of Brent’s more important points concerning this issue is the fact that producing mulatto children did not often function to benefit the women or the children, and often resulted in resentment on the part of plantation mistresses, who, victims in their own way, were forced to confront their husbands’ infidelity in the form of his illegitimate children. “Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness” (369). The children were often sold off to get them out of sight, and although some masters chose to keep their children close and to protect them, this was something the mothers had little or no control over, and at its core it was the beginning of the decimation of African American family structures.
Brent does make it clear that “whitening” the bloodline of a family could have tangible benefits. Under the luckiest of circumstances, mulattos could gain respect, security, and sometimes even freedom, either at the hands of their “fathers,” or by increasing the likelihood of escape, probably not something white slaveholders anticipated as they forced themselves on their young slave girls.
However, it was precisely these things that were the beginning of the familial split that still echoes through African American culture. The ability of some slaves to leave, to gain freedom, or to run away, put them on a different level, and often in a different place, than their less blended family members. Freedom at any price, while perfectly understandable, and perhaps commendable, was the catalyst of destruction of African American family continuity and support.
Toni Morrison
“Morrison's commitment to resurfacing the dead and paying tribute to black Americans of previous generations has made her works particularly poignant to African American readers” (Davis).
Paradise: From the first line of the book, “They shoot the white girls first,” (3) Morrison begins to set the stage for a complicated tale of the dangers and pitfalls of the quest for racial purity. However, rather than the traditional take on the subject—it is better to be white or light—Morrison leaves no doubt that she will approach the issue from the other side. Weaving a compelling story of a town inhabited by only the darkest skinned African Americans, the 8-rocks, Morrison tells a tale of violence, paranoia, and racism, with the added paradox of privilege going to the darkest rather than the fairest. Critic Marni Gauthier tells us that, “The founding families of Ruby are distinguished by their impeccable dark skin, evidence that they have not been corrupted by ‘racial tampering’” (421). The inhabitants of the town Morrison depicts in Paradise live by the blood-rule, an ironic twist of the post-civil war blood rule of Southern states—each unspoken and rarely broken as the consequences to the offending individuals could be high. One of the characters, Pat Best, becomes clearly aware of the severity of this blood rule when reading an old letter she comes across:
Caddy, they don’t hate us because Mama was your first customer. They hate us because she looked like a cracker and was bound to have cracker-looking children like me, and although I married Billy Cato, who was an 8-rock like you, like them, I passed the skin on to my daughter, as you and everybody knew I would…We were the first visible glitch. (196)
The letter goes on to recount subsequent marriages and children who, by relation to the “first visible glitch,” violate the blood rule. The author of the letter knew that no matter what happened her mother would never overcome having “sunlight skin,” and would always be a product “of racial tampering” (197).
Racism in the town of Ruby leads eventually to the massacre of an innocent group of women living on the outskirts of the town. In an interesting plot loop, Morrison never tells the reader which of the girls at the convent is the “white girl” the men of Ruby shoot first, thereby reinforcing the point that, without “seeing” the defining skin color, all of the women are basically alike and cannot be categorized. Although one critic tells us that, “by specifying the white girl [at the opening of the novel] Morrison has reversed the accepted racial logic in which blackness is the exception, and whiteness the norm” (Krumholz), I feel that by not telling us which girl is the white girl, Morrison further blurs the lines of racial confusion, forcing readers to question the foundations of their beliefs about color.
Morrison’s approach in Paradise is non-traditional. Her characters face discrimination, but it is primarily at the hands of lighter-skinned blacks. The characters’ 8-rock color was a detriment to them until they formed the town that would exclude all but the darkest and purest-bred “Negroes.” In recounting the town’s history, Pat, ironically one of the only non-8-rock inhabitants of the town, tells us that “for ten generations they [Negros] had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black…the sign of racial purity they had taken for granted had become a stain” (194). The characters realize early on that their darkness has become a problem, and they attempt to find strength in isolation and elitism based upon the very thing that has caused them to be shunned in general society. The result is a complicated story about the detriments of the lightening process, and the negative effects of racism, exclusion, and prejudice, no matter what the rationale behind such behavior might be.
Song of Solomon: Morrison writes this as a story of confusion about racial heritage. Her protagonist, Milkman, comes from a convoluted family full of racial blending, passing, and desertion. Milkman goes on a quest for answers, but his quest is farther confused by the fact that his “white” relatives hesitate to become involved with him as it would threaten their social standing. They have basically abandoned their African American roots in favor of an easier life. “I didn’t want to go into all of that with Grace. You can imagine what she’d do with that information. You’re a stranger, so it doesn’t matter. But Grace…” (321-322).
By calling him a stranger, his aunt is distancing herself from him, along with making the obvious assumption that he will not be staying around to become part of the society she functions in. Obviously Milkman will not find the roots and family support system he is in search of. The “passing” by members of his family would forever separate them into distinct groups, effectively interrupting and destroying the family’s root structure.
Beloved: “When slavery has torn apart one's heritage, when the past is more real than the present, when the rage of a dead baby can literally rock a house, then the traditional novel is no longer an adequate instrument” (Bauermeister 133).
In the novel Beloved, Morrison addresses the miscegenation of slaves and the lasting repercussions that will “haunt” families for generations after slavery. Like the ghost of the dead baby, known only as Beloved, the lasting legacy of slavery will continue long after freedom from the actual institution. I believe Sethe’s actions to end her child’s life are a metaphor for the rightness and/or wrongness of the decisions many slave women made to either go along with forced sexual encounters, or to act violently to end them. Even the idea of sex as the only feasible bartering tool slave women had is seen in Sethe’s being coerced into having sex in order to give her child a proper gravestone. The haunting is symbolic of the emotional remains many slave women had to live with after making decisions that would alter their lives, and perhaps the lives of many generations to come after them. The past lingers on as does the ghost of Beloved.
One critic says [in Beloved Morrison portrays slavery as:]:
One of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised. The slaves are motherless, fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children, their kin. It is a world in which people suddenly vanish and are never seen again, not through accident or covert operation or terrorism, but as a matter of everyday legal policy” (University of Buffalo).
Morrison also portrays most of the white characters in the book in a negative light. They are mossy-toothed and without skin. Once again breaking from traditional narrative perspectives, Morrison portrays Whites, and whiteness, as the catalyst that functions to destroy African American families, and as an undesirable physical trait.
Lalita Tademy: Cane River
Tademy’s novel is a family saga covering multiple generations in her family’s history spanning from the times of slavery to the late 20th century. The central theme of her story is the idea of African American women consciously producing whiter children in the hopes of bettering their lives. “Don’t you ever let dark hands touch this,’ [Suzette] would say. ‘You’re too good for the likes of that. You come from quality, and you owe it to your children” (388).
What makes her story so poignant however is that fact that the more modern generations refuse to do this, taking great pride in their African American heritage. One of her protagonists expressly states his desire to find a dark-skinned Black woman to marry:
The one thing [T.O.] could do was to strengthen the blood of his own children. How many times had his mother told him blood was everything? She meant white blood, but he didn’t believe in that anymore…not brought up with the same attitudes that in the end would keep the wheel going in the same direction…a Negro woman. (396)
Tademy’s ancestors learn to see their blackness as a source of pride, and she portrays the continual whitening as a weakening device, which, while it may result in short term benefits, ends up doing irreconcilable harm to the race as a whole.
Sapphire: Push: Sapphire creates a character that is ruled a great deal by negative attitudes about herself, her color, and her race. Seething with envy of white girls everywhere, whom she perceives as having perfect lives, Sapphire makes it clear that Precious possesses a self-image so low it has destroyed her life. If she can’t be white, she wants to be lighter so that she can be seen:
Why can’t I see myself, feel where I end and begin. I sometimes look in the pink people in suits eyes, the men from bizness, and they look way above me, put me out of their eyes. My fahver don’t see me really. If he did he would know I was like a white girl, a real person inside…Can’t he see I am a girl for flowers and thin straw legs and a place in the picture. (31-32)
She hates her “mama,” hates herself, and hates her life. If Sapphire most clearly addresses the idea of white privilege in modern America, she also most clearly addresses the idea that in order to succeed her character must find peace within herself concerning her race and her heritage, and must take personal responsibility for where she will go from here in spite of her lack of privilege. Lighter skin may have made life easier, but lacking that, people must fight to find their own way.
Akissi Britton—Essence editor
Profound excerpts from a personal letter to her
sister:
My dear, dear sister Kiani:
We're like night and day, you and I. For years I looked at us as polar opposites. You, a cafe au lait princess. Me, a black-coffee-colored rebel.
The fact was, in the outside world, Black was nowhere near as beautiful as it was at home. Not for a dark-skinned girl like me. Blackie, Darky and African Booty-scratcher were the monikers given me by the kids in my all-Black elementary and mixed junior-high schools.
There, through the jeers and taunts of little Black children, I was introduced to the depths of Black self-hatred.
Because,
you see, it was in elementary school that I realized you were light and I
wasn't. And that meant you were pretty and I was ugly. And in the silent, hurt
places inside me, I hated and envied you.
I started wearing dark colors to hide myself from the world. I wore my hair in braids that covered my face so that no one could see my shade of ugly.
Then came the Black-consciousness movement in hip-hop in the late eighties and early nineties. All of a sudden dark skin was "in." Like a fad. It came into style with Public Enemy, Malcolm X hats and African medallions. When Black people first started complimenting me on my looks and my complexion, I didn't know how to handle it.
You taught me that I didn't have to wear African beads and prints to signify my Blackness to others. Not if I truly felt it on the inside…
And although it would take another ten years before I could truly enjoy my reflection in a mirror and take the time to groom and admire myself as you had always encouraged me to do, inside I had begun my journey to self-love.
And thank you for showing me how to let my shade of pretty run free.
Your li'l sis, Akissi
Akissi brings home the facts about color codes still existing today, even within the closest echelons of the African American community. Even more disturbing (to me at least) than White or European prejudice, is the idea that privilege based depth of skin color is so deeply ingrained in our society that it crosses over into the very ethnicity that is prejudiced by it in the first place. Her musings are most disturbing because, though she is successful and powerful, she still suffered feelings of inadequacy based on being the darkest member of her all black family.
Mexican-American
Authors
Sandra
Cisneros
The best Mexican American book I found that addresses the issue of color privilege is Sandra Cisneros Caramelo. Although not as predominant a theme in Mexican American literature, Cisneros does it well.
Caramelo: Sandra Cisneros addresses the issue of light and dark in Caramelo. On the very first page of this novel, she describes her father, with whom she has an on-and-off tumultuous relationship, as having skin “pulpy and soft, pale as the belly side of a shark” (3). Cisneros appears, from the beginning, to have mixed feelings about her father’s lighter skin color. A few pages later, she begins to introduce white as something to aspire towards when describing Aunty’s house (13). It is white and beautiful, yet the reader is left with the impression that it is cold and might be lacking in some way—perhaps familial warmth and welcoming.
Cisneros brings lighter skin color more to the forefront when discussing the Awful Grandmother, a self-proclaimed pure-bred Spanish woman who makes racial remarks about the darker skinned Indian people around her. Her snobbery appears to center around skin color as a determiner of class, and she is allowed to make decisions for those around her, apparently feeling that she knows what is best for them. Cisneros writes her as “like the witch in that story of Hansel and Gretel. She likes to eat boys and girls. She’ll swallow us whole, if [we] let her. Father has let her swallow Rafa” (23). Celeya obviously has ambivalent feelings towards her Grandmother who she perceives as a snob that believes that she is a purebred Spaniard, not a low-class Indian. Cisneros is writing characters that are too good for the low-class, poorer Mexicans, but not quite good enough for the more upper class Americans.
Cisneros highlights Celeya’s obsession with skin color in her narrative about Candelaria in chapter 10:
The girl Candelaria has skin bright as a copper veinte centavos coin after you’ve sucked it. Not transparent as an ear like Aunty Light-Skin’s. Not shark-belly pale like Father and Grandmother. Not the red river-color like me, nor the fried-tortilla color of the washerwoman Amparo, her mother. Not like anybody. Smooth as peanut butter, deep as burnt-milk candy. (34)
Celeya is thrilled with this brighter but darker playmate, but Cisneros reiterates the idea that her peanut butter colored skin is less that acceptable as the scene becomes one of Celeya’s mother roughly removing lice from her hair and admonishing her to stay away from the girl with skin “like caramelo. A color so sweet it hurts to even look at her” (37). She may have been beautiful and exotic, but she was not good enough for the light-skinned, pure-bred Reyes family.
Approaching things from yet another angle and addressing the possible negative aspects of being lighter skinned Cisneros ends up bringing the story around to show that the Reyes family was not always privileged by their light color. When Celeya is forced to transfer to a vocational school, due to financial stresses her family is undergoing, she learns that a lot of the kids at her new school are critical of her light skin. She is upset and insulted by their questioning of her heritage:
If you’ve never been farther south than Nuevo Laredo, how the hell would you know what Mexicans are supposed to look like, right? There are the green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blond Mexicans. The Mexicans with the faces of Arab sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans…Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say I don’t look Mexican. I am Mexican. Even though I was born on the U.S. side of the border. (352-353)
Celeya goes on with her verbal barrage to eventually tell the reader that even white girls do not want to be called white girls (355), yet another ironic twist by Cisneros on the traditional idea of “passing” for white.
Cisneros also addresses the issue of skin color in the characterization of Senor Regina Reyes:
Regina liked to think that by marrying Eleuterio Reyes she had purified her family blood, become Spanish, so to speak. In all honesty, her family was as dark as cajeta and as humble as a tortilla of nixtama…He was like a big grizzled vulture, but so pale and hazel-eyed, Mexicans considered him handsome because of his Spanish blood. She, on the other hand, thought herself homely because of her Indian features, but in reality she was like la India Bonita, that Indian girl, wife of the gardener, whose beauty brought Maximilian to his knees… (1126-117)
Apparently Regina cannot even see her own beauty because all she sees is her darker skin. She married not for love, but to lighten her family blood line, which worked for Narciso who was later described as “guero, fair” (157), and destined for a better life than his predecessors.
Cisneros narrative, and the implications she brings up of lighter skin acting as a priviliger for future generations, bears a striking resemblance to the narratives African Americans have been writing for years. In her essay, Ana Caban asserts that, “Through ‘Caramelo,’ Cisneros explores the dichotomies that plague an immigrant: past vs. future, Mexico vs. U.S., tradition vs. modernity, Spanish vs. English, truth vs. ‘healthy lies’ (n.p.)" I would argue that Cisneros is also exploring the dichotomies of light vs. dark (skin), in much the same way our African American authors have addressed it.
Woman Hollering Creek: Cisneros also brings skin color and the idea of white/light privilege into this novel. In the chapter “Never marry a Mexican,” one of the book’s protagonists is talking about her father’s decision to “marry down” by choosing her mother as a wife. “If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor” (69). She says that her father’s world was classy while her mother was basically poor Mexican trash. The color was more important than the socioeconomic background. A few pages later, Cisneros does bring in a negative connotation of whiteness, discussing a child’s blue veins and clearness (77), but overall the reader is left with little doubt that, in this world, light skin equals privilege, including the privilege of legitimate children rather than children that are the product of illicit affairs.
Conclusion—What
I discovered
The more I probe into the themes of race, color, privilege, and identity, the more fascinated I become with them. I find minority literature that addresses color lines and racial blending to be compelling and more poignant than any history book could ever be. Reading in a history text that, for instance, slaves were forced to have sexual relations with their masters, is not the same thing as reading Tademy’s family history, and learning how this situation would affect generations of African Americans to come. I discovered that there is a rich tradition of addressing the issue of color lines in African American literature, but not so much has been written from the view point of Mexican Americans and Native Americans.
Mexican Americans seem to have an added dimension to this theme as most of the literature addresses the color differences within their race rather than those that exist from their relationships with Euro-Americans. Although they talk little about interracial blending, they do speak to the privilege that lighter skinned Mexicans and Whites are afforded in the United States. The most predominant idea that the two minorities share when addressing this is the idea that their lives would be better if they were white. Full circle back to my original inspiration for research: finding out that I was presented without multicultural background as a child in need of adopted parents, that I was, and forever would be, better off Caucasian. I suppose in a twisted way I was granted the wish many of our characters desired.
As I stated above, I found Native American literature to be essentially lacking in dealing with the theme of skin color. The lack of topic is perhaps as interesting as the topic itself. What makes this culture so different that something so important to other cultures is basically ignored? Why is it not an issue for them? That is an interesting question for future research.
I am delighted by the wide variety of minority authors who are approaching passing and the crossing of color lines as a less than desirable thing. In my midterm I discussed the idea that perhaps minority authors were using the theme to explore the idea that members of a race must develop a strong sense of self before exploring the possibility of life “on the other side.” As an essentially Caucasian American, it is sobering to know that what we consider an inherited privilege (our whiteness) is perhaps not viewed as such by others, and has instead worked as a destructor of cultural identity for entire segments of our population. I believe many minority authors are writing with the express purpose of encouraging members of their culture to discover their true histories and to help them revel in it. After all, as Cisneros’ Celeya asks, “What can you say when you know who you are?” (355). Cisneros definitely wants to help them know.
Works Cited
Bauermeister, Erica, Jesse Larsen, and Holly Smith. 500 Great Books for Women: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Brent,
Linda. “Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl.” The Slave Narratives.
Britton,
Akissi. “Shades
of black: the hang-ups, the hurt, the healing: three women explore our
skin-color issues.” Essence.
June 2002.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1264/is_2_33/ai_87424933
Caban,
Ana. “Cisneros Tale Unravels
Family’s Past.” Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel. Sept. 29,
2002. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20020929/ai_n10813607/print
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Random House, 2002.
Davis, Kimberly C. “Postmodern Blackness: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History.” Twentieth Century Literature. Summer 1998. <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_2_44/ai_53260178/print>
Gauthier, Marni. “The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morrison’s making of Mythic History.” African American Review. Fall 2005. 415-428. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_3_39/ai_n15895659/print
Krumholz, Linda J. “Reading and insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review. Spring 2002. 643-661. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_1_36/ai_85185713/print
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Random House, 2004.
Roach,
Ronald. “When
academia meets activism: Harvard's color lines conference draws nearly 1,000
participants to share new insights, data on the nation's agenda on race.”
Black Issues in Higher Education.
9/25/2003. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_16_20/ai_108967474/print.
Sailer, Steve. “Blondes Have Deeper Roots.” VDare. Online. 12 June, 2005.
Tademy, Lalita. Cane River. New York: Warner, 2001.
University of Buffalo.
<http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/morrison/beloved.html>
Other References
http://www.census.gov/population/pop-profile/2000/chap16.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/june97/rodriguez_6-18.html
http://www.panamerco.com/reason4.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whites
Bryant, Alfred Jr. & Stanley B. Baker. “The Feasibility of Constructing Profiles of Native Americans From the People of Color Racial Identity Scale: A Brief Report.” Measuring and Development in Counseling and Development 36 (4/2003): 2-8.
Myers, Melissa L. “Race and Identity in Indian Country.” Review Essays: 799-803.