Partly Colored

Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

Leslie Bow

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780814791332
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814787106
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

1
Coloring between the Lines

Historiographies of Southern Anomaly

My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack,
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being white nor black?

—Langston Hughes, “Cross”

Images of segregation have become part of our historical conscience. They are reminders of past intolerance even as de facto segregation continues to permeate society. For better or worse, such images have also fixed our vision; we readily identify the “colored” signs over restroom doors or waiting rooms as literal signs of inequality. We also understand who they implicate; that is to say, we read the signs in black and white.

But in what ways do these assumptions foreclose a complex understanding of the work of white supremacy, its scope, influence, or nuance? A case in point: how do we read the image of divided drinking fountains? Photo-journalist Esther Bubley’s iconic 1946 photograph represents an apparently straightforward image of racial segregation.

Taken when Bubley worked as a documentary photographer for Standard Oil, the photograph depicts a man and a boy leaning over side-by-side drinking fountains at a tobacco warehouse in Lumberton, North Carolina; one fountain is marked “colored” and the other, “white.” Bubley’s photograph depicts a scene readily understood in the contemporary moment, an understanding conveyed in historian Grace Elizabeth Hale’s assessment, “the black man and the white boy drinking indicate their racial identities even as they refresh their thirsts” (2000, 174). Critic Elizabeth Abel’s interpretation of this image highlights additional axes of difference: age, gender, and class (1999). What one sees, writes Abel, is the photographer’s staging of racial fraternity in spite of the subjects’ formally separate status. They become united not only through their mutual submission as laborers, she suggests, but through the image that floats above them: a postwar advertisement showing a half-naked pinup girl offering the viewer Camel cigarettes. Abel argues that the image of the white woman secures the homosocial bond between black and white (men); sexual difference partially reconciles the scene of racial separation. The feminist critic triangulates the “colored”/white dichotomy by introducing gender as a point of mediation; in her reading, the introduction of a third space above the photograph’s focal point generates an alternative account of the image that complicates its portrayal of racial division. Her reading exemplifies the complexity of intersectional analysis in its account of the interplay between race, class, and gender, youth and maturity.

In order to gesture to another third space, I would pose this question: what if the figure drinking from the “colored” fountain was not black?

It happens that the town of Lumberton lies in Robeson County, North Carolina, where the population was distinctly divided, not in half, but in three parts: white, black, and, according to the census at the time, “other races.” This anonymous figure drinking from the segregated fountain and made to bear the weight of Jim Crow’s symbolic abjection could, in fact, identify as American Indian. How does this uncertainty change the meaning we take from the photograph or the dehumanizing history it evokes? What difference would it make?

The rise of segregation at the turn of the century forced the question of color and status in case of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County. As I discuss in the next chapter, when faced with the pressures of white or black association, the Lumbee became, ironically, Indian. Following the rise of Jim Crow, school segregation forced the assertion of the community’s identity in ways that prefigured on-going arguments for tribal federal recognition. Crucial to this process was the discourse of blood: differentiating from blacks had to be visually inscribed, while claims to whiteness—the oral lore of being descended from Raleigh’s Lost Colony—contributed to the Lumbee claim to indigenous specificity. “Indian” became intelligible through approximation—as like black or white—in ways that gesture to a context that lies beyond the photograph’s contemporary framing.

Yet Hale’s and Abel’s assumptions about this faceless man are also our own. As Charles Chesnutt writes in the 1920s, “The term ‘colored’ as applied to people partly or entirely of Negro descent is used the world over, and in the United States its meaning is not surrounded by doubt or uncertainty. No one refers to Chinamen or Japanese or Indians as ‘colored’” (1999, 566). The seemingly unequivocal association between “colored” and black indicates the power of a seamless account of history to structure the terms of our comprehension, in this case, of segregation and the subject upon whose back white supremacy rested, as well as, I would argue, the proper subject of racial grievance. Thinking of American Indians as “colored” requires thinking outside segregation’s frame and the symbolic significance that frame assumes in the post–Civil Rights moment. The “colored” man’s identity as nonblack becomes inconceivable. If this ambiguity was repressed for the sake of the law in the context of Robeson County, North Carolina in 1946, half a century later, it could simply be forgotten. Yet the feminist critic’s generative methodology can apply to her own reading: what lies on the borders of the frame establishes meaning and serves to reveal culture’s investments. If “Indian” is rendered unintelligible in our national staging of racial injustice in the South, the stakes are high: the liberal frame of political representation in the United States is based on visibility to the state, in Charles Taylor’s words, the politics of recognition. Moreover, it could be said that relations between black and white become sutured precisely through the erasure of complicating ambiguity—both in the context of segregation and in the way we remember it.

This forgetfulness of Jim Crow’s unevenness is perhaps not so much a question of historical amnesia as of historical framing: American race relations center around a black-white axis. In Colored White (2002), a study that follows upon his influential work, The Wages of Whiteness (1991), David Roediger includes a chapter entitled “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New-immigrant’ Working Class” that uncovers the “not quite white” status of eastern and southern European immigrants in the beginning of the 20th century. He asks, “What … did it mean to live ‘inbetween’?”—in this case, between the African American and the Anglo Protestant (2002, 139). In discussing why her work on Cold War civil rights focuses exclusively on the rights of African Americans, Mary L. Dudziak notes that although the “full story of civil rights reform in U.S. history cuts across racial groups,” the American policymakers of her late 20th-century inquiry nevertheless

saw American race relations through the lens of a black/white paradigm. To them, race in America was quintessentially about “the Negro problem.” Foreign observers as well remarked that the status of “the Negro” was the paradigm for exploring race in America. … As a result, [Cold War Civil Rights] works within that narrowed conception of American race relations—not because race in America is a black/white issue, but because [it] seeks to capture the way race politics were understood at a time when “the Negro problem” was at the center of the discourse on race in America (2000, 14).¹

It was and continues to be. As Derrick Bell observes, the segregated South assumes heightened significance in the staging of American race relations: “Segregation was not merely an oppressive legal regime, it consolidated the imaginative lens through which Americans would now conceive race. It also reaffirmed the binary system through which we Americans tend to think of race—i.e., ‘black’ and ‘white’” (2004, 82). Shifting the gaze to segregation’s anomaly, to American Indians, mestizos, or Asian Americans, reveals how enduring and significant that lens remains. Numerous scholars in Asian American Studies, for example, have attested to its power as well as its mythos; Harry Kitano, Eugene Wong, Gary Okihiro, Pawan H. Dhingra, Claire Jean Kim, and Daniel Y. Kim have all affirmed the significance of the black-white paradigm for locating Asian American racialization.² In 1969, Alan Nishio borrowed sociologist Edna Bonacich’s terminology for his title, “The Oriental as a ‘Middleman Minority’”: “Orientals,” he asserted, “act as the ‘well-fed’ houseboys of the Establishment, defending the plantation from the ‘lowly’ field slaves” (1969, n.p.). What becomes lost in this metaphor is its more literal referent, the effort to recruit plantation labor from Asia to the post-bellum South.

This chapter thus begins with a restorative project highlighting segregation’s inconsistencies regarding white-black social separation and documenting oscillating southern representations of Asians in particular in terms of their proximity to the “Negro.” These comparisons are both overt—as in their representation as alternative labor to supplant the newly freedmen—and subtle—as Asians become the objects of white patronage and paternalism. Multiply situated within segregation’s racial etiquette and its class structures, they nonetheless became subject to hostility at both ends of the social spectrum, hostility well-documented in popular cultural representations authored by white and black southerners alike. Mindful of the third space of Abel’s reading, I then turn to sexuality’s intersection with this specifically American and regional racial continuum, engaging sites where sexual transgression comes to define and mediate social standing. In the most documented account of Asians in the segregated South, the case of Chang and Eng Bunker, race was the least remarkable of their differences. How were race, sex, and class mediated in cultural understanding of these celebrated Siamese twins? As Cindy Wu has noted, Chang and Eng’s standing as individuals “who benefited from enslaved labor” becomes elided in their past and present circulation in popular culture (2008, 34). The chapter goes on to look at one arena in which the administration of segregation specifically recognized gradations of color: anti-miscegenation law. Engaging specific state laws in the South, I explore the ways in which the law created other “colored” subjects and their consequences for our understanding of the proper subject of racial redress as Jim Crow restrictions began to be dismantled.

The space of the in-between is one marked by surveillance and interpretation. At stake is not so much a new conception of white supremacy, but an understanding of the ways in which the narration of American racism has erased from view its ambiguity and nuance. As these interventions reveal, the interstitial is the site of both social vulnerability and rhetorical convenience.

The Etiquette of Racism or “Come on, see the Chinaman”

As the South’s second peculiar institution, segregation intended to secure black racial inferiority, a job that the legal distinction between slave and free previously achieved. In obeisance to a prior social order based on slavery, it worked to maintain a tractable labor force as both the state and vigilante threats legislated restrictions on public access, education, the exercise of citizenship, and intimate relations between individuals. It did not merely separate white from black through a series of prohibitions but created racial identity: for blacks, intending to instill what was a psychology of inferiority and for whites, providing the figures of abjection necessary to the working of alterity and self-definition. Through this system of apartheid, the state produced legal identities that exceeded their formal classification; Jim Crow made both southern blackness and whiteness, a point that Faulkner recognized in the form of Quentin Compson’s musing, “[A] nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (1984, 86). In defining and delimiting participation in the public sphere to obviate the concept of equal citizenship, segregation established a caste system in a country whose democratic principles are, in theory, antithetical to the notion of caste. Race hierarchy was, as Gunnar Myrdal noted, an “American Dilemma” (1962).

Beyond this ponderous but by no means uniform legal apparatus, what made segregation in the South distinctive was its inscription as an etiquette, a highly refined but variable system of ritualized social conduct. The separation between races specified a series of taboos enforced not only by the law and by vigilantism but by social convention. Statutory regulations might govern the most significant aspects of black life—one’s sexual partner, livelihood, social mobility, and the very exercise of citizenship—but the ceremonial requirements of living Jim Crow also manifested themselves in a series of minutely negotiated ways of being: Hat on or off? Front door or back? What mode of address? Which railway coach, elevator, doctor’s office, or diner? In the post-bellum South, social ritual contributed to the maintenance of inequality after the primary means of distinguishing between black and white—slave or free—no longer existed. Essential to this system of manners was a particularly regional sense of belonging signaled by and potentially internalized as “knowing one’s place.” For African Americans, to forget that place was to face potentially violent repercussions and the disapprobation of white and, potentially, black. Illogical to democratic principles, segregation was also a system that functioned smoothly even within the presence of barely repressed contradiction. In documenting forms of segregation by region and context, Charles S. Johnson’s 1943 Patterns of Negro Segregation reveals that Jim Crow codes were not uniform but fluid, and often so unevenly applied as to defy rationality. On the taboo of interracial dining, a black insurance agent noted, “[White people] seem to think it would make the food poison if a Negro ate with them. They don’t say anything about what is the case when the Negro woman in the kitchen fixes the food” (cited in Johnson 1943, 144). Such contradictions highlight the artificiality of social taboos placed on physical and social intimacy. Johnson likewise noted that office buildings in Atlanta had separate elevators for African Americans subject to additional requirements of uncertain expectation: “All Negroes must ride up in this elevator,” he writes, “but all of the cars will take Negroes down” (42).

But to say that specific counties, towns, or even buildings had their own interpretations of segregationist mores does not imply that one was therefore exempt from knowing them. To be ignorant of one’s place was to risk not only public humiliation but physical assault, especially given that the degree of one’s alleged offense did not necessarily prefigure that severity of mob response. In 1908, among reasons for lynching, Ray Stannard Baker listed these: “For being father of boy who jostled white women,” “Stealing seventy-five cents,” “Expressing sympathy for mob’s victim” (1964, 176–177). Nevertheless, the color line between black and white was itself not always clearly demarcated. The following sign posted in an Atlanta streetcar, for example, specified, in logical and orderly fashion, how blacks and whites were to comply with Jim Crow requirements:

WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM THE FRONT OF CAR TOWARD
THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT

Witnessing this sign and the friction caused by asking both black and white patrons to move in compliance compelled Baker to comment, “This very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where it is” (1964, 31).

If neither blacks nor whites knew just where the line was drawn, such a directive could hardly be clear to those whose very classification was contested. Langston Hughes’s poem, “Cross,” speaks to the ambiguous position of biracial individuals: being both white and black, where did they fit in a racially stratified and segregated society? Jim Crow had a ready answer thanks to the “one drop” rule of hypodescent: they were black. Nevertheless, the figure of the “mulatto” is a site of cultural anxiety as a reminder of the color line’s permeability. Thus, incidents of passing are significant sites for cultural critique precisely because they disrupt segregation’s easy racial epistemology, revealing less about the intrinsic nature of racial identity than the irrationality underlying the South’s ordering binary. My subject here redirects Hughes’s question by suggesting an alternative intermediacy, one no less a question of epistemology, but avoiding the questions of authenticity implied by concepts of closeting, imposture, or biological descent.

The era of segregation is scarcely remembered as one fraught with inconsistency or contingency; rather, the period has come to signify the very blatant nature of racial discrimination, dehumanization, and violence. Yet segregation was a cultural system that called for interpretation not despite but because of the simple schematic it drew between groups of people. One of the themes that runs throughout Richard Wright’s coming of age memoir, Black Boy, is the interpretive imperative of living Jim Crow. Richard confesses his inability to read southern codes of behavior:

The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. … Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt. (1993, 231)

Richard’s failure to internalize the etiquette of racism reveals both the artificiality and complexity of its rules, the knowledge of which is essential to his survival, and the rejection of which is essential to his humanity. His autobiography provides a significant record of what racial performance segregation required, even as scholars have pointed out the rhetorical embellishments or omissions that figured into its making.³ In pointed correction, James Baldwin famously wrote, “It is the etiquette which is baffling, not the spirit” (1961, 108). It is that spirit—the straightforward hatred that underlies white supremacy’s legal regime—that has come to frame the era. Yet looking at American Indians, mestizos, and, in particular, Asian Americans within that regime recalls Richard Wright’s experience as one intimately connected to segregation’s interpretive necessity. If the South’s enduring iconography conveys with succinct clarity the dehumanizing force of segregation, what of segregation’s subtle but no less insidious work?...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking Interstitially
• 1 Coloring between the Lines: Historiographies of Southern Anomaly
• 2 The Interstitial Indian: The Lumbee and Segregation’s Middle Caste
• 3 White Is and White Ain’t: Failed Approximation and Eruptions of Funk in Representations of the Chinese in the South
• 4 Anxieties of the ‘Partly Colored’
• 5 Productive Estrangement: Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature
• 6 Transracial/Transgender: Analogies of Difference in Mai’s America
• Afterword: Continuums, Mobility, Places on the Train
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author