Racial Ambiguity in the Age of Integrationism: Charles Mingus
Mingus was from a Black family with a diverse ethnic background. Members of his family were German, Chinese, Native American and African-American. He was teased and shunned by many different kinds of people he grew up with in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Boys of Mexican descent and white children teased him for being Black, and other Black children ostracized him, calling him a “fat-ass, half-yella, schitt-colored nigger,” he would later recall.
Writing in the third person in his memoir Beneath the Underdog, he remembered that "whenever he looked in the mirror and asked ‘What am I?’ he thought he could see a number of strains—Indian, African, Mexican, Asian and a certain amount of white from a source his father boasted of. He wanted to be one or the other but he was a little of everything, wholly nothing, of no race, country, flag or friend.” He found little acceptance anywhere, however. “All he wanted was to be accepted somewhere and he still wasn’t, so fuck it! He became something else. He fell in love with himself,” he wrote. “I understood what he was trying to do. I’ve met a few other people who live on that colorless island.”
Mingus was suspicious of racial classification and often displayed a kind of anarchic sense of humor around race. Once, while staging a counter-festival to the famous Newport Jazz Festival, he told a white pianist that he couldn't book him a hotel "in this Jim Crow town." The cover to his 1960 album Mingus Dynasty portrayed Mingus in full imperial Chinese regalia. And in 1964, while introducing a piece known as "Meditations on Integration," or "Praying with Eric," at a benefit concert for the NAACP, Mingus railed against segregation. He compared it to fascist Nazi Germany and poked fun at the absurdities of race by claiming white Southerners were separating "the green from the red."
Mingus felt that the racialized boundaries of the music industry limited the creative potential of music, and he made efforts to draw on a variety of musical genres and traditions in spite of their racial coding: European classical, Spanish flamenco, Mexican mariachi, and African-American gospel, jazz and blues. Speaking of a white tuba player who played with him, Mingus said, "he's colorless, like all the good ones."
