“Blackness Thirteen Ways: Art, Life & the Revisions of a Mulatta Lesbian,” the newly published book by art historian and academic J. Vanessa Lyon, may signal a developing movement toward multiracial self-definition. Lyon’s book is equal parts memoir and sociocultural study of African-descended multiracial people. The bulk of the work focuses on multiracial people who are potentially white-presenting or, as Lyon might describe it, “passable” as white — as is Lyon herself. Lyon explores the frustrating experience of being someone who is “racially unreadable.” She explains, “To pass, or be seen to pass in one setting, is to be perceived as ‘diverse’ or merely ethnic in another.”
Lyon was raised in a predominantly white upper-middle-class Denver, Colorado, neighborhood by a “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) mother and stepfather. She has no idea what her Black father looked like — a gap that enabled denial of her Blackness far into adulthood.
Split into 13 chapters that alternate between memoir and cultural criticism, “Blackness Thirteen Ways” challenges the one-drop rule and urges readers to re-examine reflexive conclusions about categorizing race.
Employing her expert eye as an art historian, Lyon highlights historical Black and multiracial presence in society, and structures of white supremacy, through numerous works of fine art, such as Rembrandt’s etching The White Negress; caricatures of Saartje (Sarah) Baartman; and Heirlooms and Accessories by Kerry James Marshall. In engaging, energetic, elegantly written prose, Lyon explores how subjects are represented, and what messages their positioning in those works reinforce.
Casta paintings, popular among the 18th-century European elite, receive a great deal of attention. Acting simultaneously as tools of racial classification and reinforcement of social hierarchy, they reflected anxieties about the growing number of multiracial people and dehumanized them by reducing subjects to their racial characteristics.
Illustrating the humiliations women have endured under systems of racial classification, even if privileged by “passably” light skin, Lyon also discusses real-life cases of Harriet Jacobs, Meghan Markle, Alice Jones, artist Adrian Piper, and Queen Charlotte. Two examples are the blackamoor brooch Princess Michael of Kent wore to a luncheon with Markle, arguably to remind Markle of her “place,” and the forced disrobement of Jones in court in the tragic Rhinelander case.
Books and film, including “Imitation of Life,” “Passing,” “Sinners,” and “Plum Bun,” also go under Lyon’s microscope, uncovering unique ways multiracial people navigate life and are perceived by society. In one example, she discusses the dark makeup movie studios created then applied to Lena Horne’s body to ensure audiences did not perceive her onscreen romances (with Black partners of course) as interracial. She indicts the film “Sinners.” “When the Blackest film around remorselessly relies on stereotypes of Mulatta treachery, I despair,” she comments.
Lyon’s approach, continually revealing herself as she examines cultural products, is helpful for contextualizing those critiques. However, Lyon could have strengthened the book in a number of ways, including investigating contrasting examples where Black and multiracial women appeared in Western arts as fully realized human beings, rather than primarily as racial types, racially ambiguous figures, or symbols of servitude; or providing points of comparison through perhaps abolitionist painting tradition and other 19th-century visual depictions of light-skinned mixed-race people that were at least overt attempts to subvert expectations of that day, such as the painting “Portrait probably of Mary Ann Tritt Cassell,” attributed to James Alexander Simpson, and the photograph “Learning is Wealth” by Charles Paxson.
Lyon’s early acceptance of her lesbian identity stands in stark contrast to resistance in accepting her Black ancestry. She admits to limited exposure to Black people and longstanding hostile feelings toward her Blackness. The book’s cover illustration is a drawing of her as a child, by her artist mother. Lyon confessed she was always too “embarrassed to hang or even frame” because it made her look “so Black.” She reveals discomfort at her girlfriends thinking of her as Black. The confessions assist the reader in judging Lyon’s interpretations of society and art, and also lead the reader to question some of her conclusions.
One notable example is what can be interpreted as an overly critical eye toward Black people. For instance, she claims, without providing evidence, that multiracial women such as Kamala Harris are essentially rejected by the Black community until they achieve fame.
At times, Lyon appears to reproduce the racial essentialism she critiques, such as repeatedly associating fuller breasts and larger, muscular bodies with Blackness despite the prevalence of similar physiques among white women in European art.
Lyon’s aforementioned criticism of Mary’s hypersexuality in “Sinners” neglects a comparison with Pearline, a dark-skinned married woman who also pursues a sexual relationship. Ultimately, though, Lyon interrogates the racial assumptions embedded in Western art, she seems less willing to scrutinize the assumptions she brings to her encounters with Black people or observations about how Black communities regard multiracial individuals.
Weaknesses aside, Lyon’s very honest (if sometimes less than self-aware) discussion of deeply personal and potentially embarrassing or controversial feelings and experiences, from elementary school and into professional life, provide an insightful resource for those interested in future demographic shifts, visual representation of phenotypically white-presenting multiracial people, and how self-identity and culture are both aggressively and passively shaped by white supremacy.
