Mulatto America

The Los Angeles Times

Talty is interested in moments when people transcended hate, when the races mimicked and borrowed from each other. He spends a chapter on The Lost History of the White Slave and another on interracial Christian revivals in slavery times. Here, he makes the point that in Christianity, slaves found a vocabulary of freedom that forced unintended demands on white society and helped blacks make a "negotiated entrance into American life, just as in the early 1920s whites would make their ... entrance into deep black culture when they [fell] in love with jazz." This beautifully written book makes many such wonderful connections between past and present, black and white. — Kate Manning

Publishers Weekly

Miscegenation, both cultural and biological, brings forth new ideas and undermines narrow conceptions, argues Talty, a noted culture writer for the New York Times Magazine, Spin and Vibe. Describing his project not as traditional academic history but as "literary journalism," Talty draws on a hodgepodge of subjects that he admits cannot serve as a comprehensive survey. His chronology hops from the days when black slaves and white indentured servants mixed to the emergence of a European-minded black intellectual class at the turn of the 20th century and the use of hip-hop as one of the last strongholds of ghetto authenticity. Some of Talty's prose in the earlier chapters, which deal primarily with prevailing notions of blackness in the pre-Civil War era, lacks the forceful, imaginative analysis of later chapters, which showcase the pop-culture byproducts of race mixing. The careers of the first "Black" celebrities, such as Paul Robeson and Dorothy Dandridge, are regarded as complex instances of signification that invigorated the public at large while destroying some of their messengers. Talty's background as a critic is also reflected in his eloquent take on jazz: "It acted as an undertow pulling fans and musicians toward a realization of a complex black humanity, while only barely rippling the surface of 1920s and 1930s race relations." Few of Talty's ideas are revolutionary, but this book is an informed, occasionally inspired work that pulls its historical examples under a broad view of biracialism-as a phenomenon of memes as well as genes. It's a concept that more than sustains this smart, popularizing account. (Jan. 19) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Journalist Talty guides us through a history of mulatto culture (both the mixing of races and mixed-race individuals) from the mid-1700s to the present, admirably covering a huge amount of social and historical information to arrive at the present-day integration of white and black culture. Mixed-race individuals pioneered the overall integration of black and white races: "Black firsts" such as Dorothy Dandridge and Paul Robeson garnered respect from whites and were viewed as wonders of their race or "honorary whites," while later, stars such as Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali crossed the color line on their own terms. The development of jazz saw whites emulating black musicians to the point of breaking the black cultural code, while the black movement of the Sixties embraced black power as "whites learned how it felt to be the object of racial hatred." Talty suggests that now blacks and whites have choices, allowing the personal finally to trump the social and historical. His conclusion is reminiscent of Shelby Steele's in The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. An intellectual discourse on popular culture, more literary than academic, this volume is recommended to public and academic libraries.-Paula N. Arnold, M.L.S., Brighton, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Freelance journalist Talty examines encounters between white and black America that created what he labels a "mulatto culture."

The author begins with pre-Civil War accounts of whites who were kidnapped or sold by their families into slavery. Using both court records and memoirs, he defines this tiny population (perhaps 30 abductions a year), noting that children were the preferred targets because adults had voting records and memories to prove their whiteness. Once the children were regarded as "black," Talty shows, their appearance and memories were entirely discounted. One slave trader confessed on his deathbed that, "in August 1774, he had purchased an entire boatload of Irish natives and sold them in the South, advertising them as light-skinned blacks," because in that category they would bring a higher profit than as indentured servants. These slaves had to prove they were Caucasian in "trials of whiteness." At about the same time, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was offering near-white children in anti-slave auctions held to raise ransom money to free the youngsters. White audiences responded to these demonstrations very favorably, although at actual sales in the South, lighter-skinned captives "could disrupt slave auctions and unnerve an entire town." From here, the text moves on to the antebellum South and examines the effect of fundamentalist Christianity on blacks, looking specifically at conversion narratives, observing that it was traditional for black converts to describe themselves as becoming "white" upon entering heaven. An essay on interracial relationships rediscovers wonderful stories of whites drinking their paramours’ blood in order to circumvent the "one-drop"rule; another piece discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’s role in creating a movement that led whites (for possibly the first time) to envy black culture. In these opening chapters, Talty does a splendid job of unraveling fact, fiction, and legend. The remaining six pieces, which focus on such cultural movements as jazz, hip-hop, and disco, are slightly less engaging.

An interesting, if uneven, blend of literary journalism.