Kiyan's reflection post

My favorite post was from Ellen Craft to the white male persona she embodied when her and William escaped to slavery. I wanted to explore the performative nature of race and gender, their intersection, and how this act of "passing" subverted the foundation of racial and gender identity.

The themes that interested me the most were passing and intersectionality. Passing complicates the construction of race, since it debunks myths about a biological basis for race, but show how race is informed by behavior and cultural artifacts. The idea of intersectionality interests me because various identities informed eachother. I was particularly fascinated by the conflation of race, gender, and class. For example, in the picture we saw in class of the racially ambiguous black family from New England many people believed them to be white because of artifacts that showed their elevated class status. Privilege and wealth is associated with whiteness, as we learned.

A question I have is how the "DL identity", a gay or bisexual male passing for heterosexual, complicates and affects black masculinity, and what is reveals about "Black men" as a constructed identity.

Final Reflections – April House

As a psychology major, I generally approach matters of identity in terms of the self and personal, individual mechanisms. I am especially pleased that this course encouraged in depth analysis of historical contexts and how these macro/aggregate influences drive individual behavior and practice. Further, this class sparked an interest in fictional and biographical history that I never knew I possessed. I suspected that historical research encompassed tenets of solving a difficult puzzle or discovering a new revelation – but I had underestimated how intensely personal it is to investigate the details of someone’s life and learn how they actually might have lived. At times, I felt as if I was getting acquainted with individuals who desperately wanted their stories conveyed and understood. Further, this course challenged my own traditional notions of identity (gender and race) and the innumerable forces that shape it – including religion, sexual orientation, social class, geographic region or even place and time of birth.

Our blog assignments allowed me to 'channel' -- if you will -- assess and examine these lives in a manner that was personally meaningful and relevant. Initially, I didn't expect to enjoy the project, but during the course of our readings I found myself deeply immersed and curious about the figures we encountered. I really wondered who they were and how they lived. The selected narratives, stories and accounts deeply resonated with me and I often contemplated how many stories had been lost and how many countless others yearned to be told.

I still remain curious and interested in the myriad intersectionalities that complicate and confuse matters of identity construction and construal. The human spectrum is so full and robust that it is short-sided to evaluate an individual or a people solely in terms of a singular, isolated dimension.

My favorite blog submissions were the two regarding Helga's Father/Helga and Sally Hemings/Annette Reed-Gordon. These particular assignments invoked intensely compelling sentiments that I attempted to express in another’s voice. In generally completing the blog assignments, my primary concern was that my estimation of our subjects’ feelings and perspectives were fairly accurate and justified. Sometimes it was difficult to shrug the essentialism of my 21st century worldview – but I really tried to fashion someone else’s world through their own eyes.

Thanks for a fabulous class and inspiring a new personal interest worthy of insightful exploration.

Reflection

Looking back I have to say I am surprised and impressed at how far I have come. In my first class (which was technically the second class) I was extremely nervous at how I, as your average 'white' guy would function in this class. Everyone seemed to be a CSRE major, and I didn't even know what that stood for. I remember listening to people describe their identity stories and thinking "When have I ever had an identity crises?" and "What identity issues do I have?" The thought had never entered my mind, I thought. In retrospect I had thought about the concept of identity within my own family, but never quite couched it into those terms. I'll come back to this later in the blog post.

For now I think I should talk about my favorite blog post - my post about Ah Toy's suicide note. The story of Ah Toy was briefly told in the 'Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture' I bent the rules of the blog posts a little bit since my suicide note was not written to anyone in particular. But I thought the spirit of the post fit within the guidelines. Anyway, since I had not read the actual book, writing the suicide note was a little difficult. I couldn't capture Ah Toy's dialect. But I thought I was able to gleam a sense of his frustration and mix it with a little of my own past frustrations with girls and produce a heartfelt suicide note.

Back to my thoughts on identity...I have a much better understanding of how to talk about identity and what is my own identity. Over the course of the term I feel like I have been able to make more insightful comments in class as I've grasped the language of identity. And I think that's enabled me to reflect on my own identity issues with regard to my mixed religion family. That helped me put together my thoughts for my last meeting with Ms. Hobbes about my final paper. I certainly have thought about the loss of Judaism from generation to generation in my dad's family, but I had never quite articulated it as a question of my identity. Hopefully I have learned enough this quarter to write an articulate thoughtful paper on this subject. I hope so!

I really enjoyed this class, and I hope everyone else appreciated my "diversity" as well.

Ben

Jacobson to Morrison

Ms. Morrison,

I enjoyed reading your article "On the Back of Blacks." I certainly agree with your overall point. One of the main ways that immigrant ethnic, racial or religious groups assimilated into the greater 'white' culture was through their difference to a homegrown minority. You focus on blacks although I would add Native Americans too especially from the early history of the American colonies to the last of the American-Indian wars. But still, I agree with your general presence that "only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimiliation complete."

However, I begin to differ where to try to overstate the problem. Your statement the immigrant's "nemesis is understood to be African American." This is simply not true. The most obvious example that come to mind is the togetherness experienced by soldiers in World War II where the white men of very different backgrounds were forced to come together and rely on each other for survival and victory. The nemesis here that brought all these men together was Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, not blackness.

Certainly there is much truth in your statement that "stability is white. Disorder is black." But this simply does not prove that blacks were the necessary enemy needed to gain access to the exclusive white club.

Matthew Jacobson

Questions:

1) Are we truly at a point today where the many ethnic groups that Jacobson describes are truly white?

2) Does whiteness become more accepting as it grows? i.e. is whiteness more, less or just as exclusive a club as it was 150 years ago?

Chestnutt to DuBois

Mr. DuBois,

In the beginning of your essay "The Souls of Black Folk" you decry that the "the shadow of deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people." Earlier you mention that you believe the fundamental conflict within African-Americans is the split between "his two-ness - An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."

While I appreciate your efforts to document and describe the plight of those of African descent in America, I believe you narrow your focus far too broadly. Specifically, I think you completely ignore the issues felt by the mulatto. Mixed-race people face an entirely new set of problems on top of the problems facing the genuine Negro. How do you decide whether a person is black or white? It is certainly absurd to classify a man fifteenth-sixteenths white as a black man. But what about a man 14/16ths? What about 13/16ths? 11, 9, 5, 3, 1/16th? Where do we draw the line? Do we decide by reputations, by reception into society, by what? The officials laws vary greatly between states.

Before the Civil War the color line was regulated strictly in theory. But now, since enfranchisement the black group has been split numerous times. Mr. DuBois you forget about these many negros that have to contend not only with black identity and American identity, but also with white identity. What do they do? Since the mixed race population is not insignificant by any means, I think it is of the utmost importance that you deal with this group of people.

Sincerely,

Charles Chestnutt

Questions:

1) How do you actually identify a black person from a white person? Can you "tell" other than by skin tone?

2) Is Pudd'nhead Wilson's fingerprint method a parody of identity? Or is it trying to promote the idea that you can 'fingermark' black versus white?

Thomas Jefferson to Sally

Sally,

I find myself living in a grand contradiction of sorts, that no matter what I do I cannot seem to escape. I confess to have a physical aversion toward dark-skinned Africans. I do not like them, I find them rather disgusting, yet for some reason I find myself hopelessly attracted to you. Yes, I know that you certainly look white, but at the same time when I look at you the thought of your black race cannot be completely erased from my mind. I should be repulsed. I should be disgusted. But I am not.

So too do I find the thought of race-mixing to be an unpleasant one. The amalgamation of black and white produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent. Yet at the same time I find myself bonded to you and the children we have created. I cannot abandon you or them. I will take care of you all to the best of my abilities.

Unfortunately the black in your blood is omnipresent. I could never leave my wife, and regardless of her I could have never been with you. And to be honest I cannot say that I love you. Yet at the same time I cannot be certain that I don't. This is all very perplexing to me, but I suppose that's how things are meant to be between us. Weirdly, I like it that way.

Thomas

Questions:

1) Why did it take so long for a book like this to become written? Has it taken all these year for the American people to become comfortable acknowledging that a white founding father as legendary as Thomas Jefferson could have had a real relationship with a black woman? We have certainly seen various examples recently of illegitimate black children. John McCain comes first to my mind (although his rumor proved to be false), but there are definitely others that I am blanking right now.

Reflection

This course has really helped me think through and re-think concepts of race from a variety of different perspectives. In particular, the issue of "whiteness" and whether it is appropriate as a category of racial analysis is something that I had not considered before this class.

We started off with the story of Ellen Craft. At this point I was concerned with the fact this this memoir, written by William craft, was passed off a memoir of both his and his wife's journey to the North. Ellen Craft seemed to be given less agency than the tremendous role that she played in their escape. She was also described almost solely through the role of the color of her skin and her physicality or beauty, rather then as a agent of movement and change in the Craft's life.

Next, in Benito Cerano, I was concerned by the issue that the whiteness or blackness of a person was correlated to the sympathy that person received. In retrospect, this is clearly an obvious point, but this issue was particularly striking to me in this story. The issue that in our history people were able to allocate more sympathy to those with lighter skin is still baffling to me. It seems so bizarre and so cruel that something as frivolous and uncontrollable as the color of one's skin could have been the cause of such a disastrous institution.

Furthermore, this artificiality in the construction of race was so bluntly and poignantly portrayed in Puddenhead Wilson. Such a clever way to portray the strangeness of this institution!

In the Jazz Singer, Playing Indian, and Matthew Frye Jacobson's piece, the issue of passing as "white" by denigrating other races like Blacks and Native Americans was a truly new concept for me. I had never considered that this notion of creating self as NOT the "Other" is a way to not be the "Other." Later on, I realized that using this notion to show that European immigrants became white after having overcome prejudice downplays the intense prejudice that African Americans and Native Americans faced in comparison.

I've really enjoyed the conversations that we've had in this class and the ways in which the movies have tied into these concepts. Thanks to the class for really helping mold and challenge my ideas about race in America.