Mixed Race Studies

The two studies reported here show that mixed-race individuals in the United States who identify as biracial or multiracial can encounter difficulty in asserting their identities, and that such constraints can lead to negative psychological consequences. In Study 1 we found that when discussing instances in which their biracial or multiracial identity caused them to feel tension, mixed-race individuals spontaneously mentioned demographic questionnaires that forced them to select only one racial group. Using this real-world experience as a model, Study 2 found that compared with those who were able to choose multiple racial groups, those who were constrained to only one racial group showed lower performance self esteem and motivation. Additionally, this constraint, even after it was removed, influenced participants’ subsequent report of their racial identities. Those who had been forced to choose only one racial group were more likely to report a discrepancy between their chosen identity and their social experience.

Sarah S. M. Townsend, Hazel R. Markus, Hilary B. Bergsieker, “My Choice, Your Categories: The Denial of Multiracial Identities,” Journal of Social Issues, Volume 65, Number 1 (2009): 185-204.

Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880

Johns Hopkins University Press
2007
344 pages
11 halftones, 2 line drawings
Hardback ISBN: 9780801886942; Paperback ISBN: 9780801898198

Daniel R. Mandell, Professor of History
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

• Winner, 2008 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians

Tribe, Race, History examines American Indian communities in southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction, when Indians lived in the region’s socioeconomic margins, moved between semiautonomous communities and towns, and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites.

Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. He analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War.

Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England.

Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture

University of Kansas
April 2011
358 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3456911
ISBN: 9781124667348

Rozanne McGrew Stringer

In this study, I examine images of the black female and black male body and the female Spanish Gypsy by four artists—Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—that articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1862 and 1900. Notably, whiteness—made visible and raced—is also implicated in some of the images I analyze. I look closely at the visual stereotype of the seductive, dark-skinned female Spanish Gypsy and the primitive and debased black male, as well as at representations of the abject black female body. I also consider the construction of “whiteness” as an unfixed and complex notion of French identity, particularly as it applies to the bourgeois white female body.

I analyze images in which representations of racial identity seem unproblematic, but I show that these images articulate a host of uncertainties. I contextualize each image through analyses of nineteenth-century French representations of the black person and Spanish Gypsy by modernist and academic artists, nineteenth-century racialist science, French fiction and periodicals, and entertainment spectacles such as the circus and human zoos. My methodology draws primarily on formalism, social history, and postcolonial and feminist theory.

In my examination of representations of racial difference in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists and natural scientists to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the discourses on racial hierarchies and classifications. I explore nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity through the emerging science of anthropology, but I also expand my study to interrogate hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity. I consider how these images expand and problematize the meaning of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. I also demonstrate the paradoxical correspondence and oscillation between the racial stereotype and the culturally dominant power responsible for the stereotype’s creation and perpetuation. My study seeks to illuminate what I see as the hybridity and heterogeneity of racial identity, for the person of color as well as for the “white” European, discretely and subtly disclosed in these images.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Mme Camus’s Shadow: Degas and Racial Consciousness
• Chapter Two: Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette: Unfixing the Racial Stereotype
• Chapter Three: Beholding Beauty: The Black Female Body in Frédéric Bazille’s Late Oeuvre
• Chapter Four: Masculinity and the Object of Desire in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat dansant dans un bar
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Illustrations

Introduction

The juxtaposition of a black woman and white woman in Frédéric Bazille’s canvas, La Toilette [Figure 1], 1870, at first glance seems to uphold normative nineteenth-century conceptions about the separation and hierarchization of the races. The semi-nude kneeling black woman, attired only in a headscarf and multi-colored striped skirt, attends to the seated light skinned female nude who is placed at the center of the composition. Standing to the left of the seated nude is a second female servant with dark eyes and hair, and a sallow complexion. Surprisingly, it is the interchange between the kneeling and seated women that especially commands the viewer’s attention. While one might expect to see the white woman depicted as the principal focus of the pairing, her body is rendered as a limp and generalized form. Yet, the body of the black woman is depicted with specificity and not reduced to a racialized type. Indeed, the skin coloration of the seated female nude in Bazille’s image could be characterized as “blank” whiteness while Bazille imparts an unexpected radiance to the black woman’s skin. Bazille composed the flesh tones of the seated nude woman from a palette of analogous icy whites which contrasts markedly with the array of luminous hues—warm browns, copper, orange, pink, and plum—with which he painted the black woman’s skin. In formal terms, Bazille painted the image of a black woman that was at odds with established social and pictorial traditions by suggesting an aestheticized and a particularized black female body.

Bazille’s image of the black female body in La Toilette is situated at an intersection between mid- to late nineteenth-century French scientific models that established the strategies of defining racial and hierarchical difference and the visual representation of race. Certainly, artists employed multiple strategies for visualizing racial difference during the second half of the nineteenth century, but many producers of visual culture subscribed to the ideology that essential differences separated the human races. In this dissertation, I will show how signs of racial difference in images by Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec evoke ambivalence toward racial identity. I explore how fluid notions of race in late nineteenth-century France are unexpectedly disclosed in these works.

In my examination of representations of constructions of race in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I have chosen to investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists, natural scientists, and most notably by contemporary cultural historian and postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the nineteenth-century discourse about racial hierarchies and classifications. The images I have selected expand and problematize the notion of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. “Hybridity … makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different,” writes Robert J. C. Young in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Young distinguishes biological hybridity—inter-racial mixing that produces heterogeneous offspring—from cultural hybridity, which he argues is transformative and irrevocably alters the physical, spatial, and metaphorical separation of two discrete entities. I will explore the concept of hybrid zones as sites where boundaries between absolute difference and sameness are effaced, and contact and interaction result in shifts of identity that dismantle the sense of racial or cultural exclusivity and authenticity.

In this study, I employ both the literal and metaphorical notions of hybridity. Since the requisite for biological hybridity is the intermixing of distinct “races,” my dissertation focuses on racialized populations with which the French had significant contact in the nineteenth century: Negroes and Gypsies. I also interrogate what constituted “whiteness” for the French in the second half of the nineteenth century and how visual culture inscribed, indeed participated in creating, unstable and fluid designations of racial difference for populations of color as well for the “white” Spanish Gypsy by Degas, Manet, Bazille, and Toulouse-Lautrec that expose the unreliability of racist ideologies and articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by many French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1860 and 1900. I investigate nineteenth-century notions about racial hybridity through the lens of biology and ethnology, but I also expand my study to interrogate hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity.

I examine how French representations of the African Caribbean, North and West African black, and Spanish Gypsies visually expressed the anxieties about and fascination with the growing numbers of non-white populations living in France. Colonial expansion in the West Indies and Africa resulted in unions between French colonists and colonized women and the offspring of these interracial relationships elicited concerns about the degradation of the white race and civilization. Within their nation’s borders, the French viewed immigrant populations of blacks from their colonies and itinerant Spanish Gypsies – deemed ethnically distinct from Europeans – with suspicion, derision, and desire. The Negro and Gypsy were simultaneously marked as overtly sexual, primitive, and intellectually inferior. Although the French established a racial hierarchy that affirmed Europeans superior to non-white races, colonialism and immigration inevitably contributed to the dissolution of precise racial boundaries. My dissertation considers the areas where the dominant culture and its perceived inferior intersect and how artists represented those “in-between”6 states of racial and cultural identity…

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Dispossessed: Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes: an Advocate’s Chronicle

University of Oklahoma Press
May 1998
384 pages
9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
ISBN-10: 0806130431; ISBN-13: 978-0806130439

Parker M. Nielson

This book is out of print.

In The Dispossessed, Parker M. Nielson chronicles the tragic story of the mixed-blood Utes. A leading Utah attorney, Nielson represented this group in its suit against the U.S. government, decided by the Supreme Court in 1972. Although the Court determined that the mixed-bloods had been defrauded, it declined to restore their property. Basing his account on extensive research as well as his own firsthand experience, Nielson brings to light for the first time the disturbing events that led up to the landmark decision.

Deprived of their native lands in central Utah by immigrant Mormons, the mixed-blood Utes—almost exclusively members of the Uintah band—were confined to a reservation in eastern Utah, with a promise from the U.S. government that the land would be theirs alone forever. This promise was not kept. The final blow was the Termination Act, enacted in the early 1950s. Designed to end government supervision of American Indians and the obligation of federal entitlements, its consequences for the mixed-blood Utes—as well as for many other Indian groups—were devastating, for it deprived them of their assets, land, and very way of life.

Drawing in particular on the testimony of individual Utes affected by the termination policy, Nielson discloses the broken promises and backhanded schemes perpetuated by government officials and the Utes’ own lawyers, whose motives were compromised by self-interest. The author thus explores an all-too-neglected subject: the role of tribal attorneys in influencing tribal histories.

Last Child

Henry Holt and Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2005
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-7739-1, ISBN10: 0-8050-7739-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4299-3709-2, ISBN10: 1-4299-3709-2

Michael Spooner, Director
Utah State University Press

A mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world

Rosalie’s biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she’s at the fort with her father and Last Child when she’s in the village with her mother.

But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie’s world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real.

Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Harvard University Press
September 1999
368 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches; 14 halftones, 2 tables
Paperback ISBN: 9780674951914

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Professor of American Studies & History
Yale University

• Winner of the 1999 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association
• 1999 Best Book on the Social Construction of Race, Sponsored by the American Political Science Association Section on Race, Ethnicity and Politics
• Co-Winner of the American Political Science Association’s 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award

America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of “whiteness studies” and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counterhistory of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation—race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration—are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

Table of Contents

• Note on Usage
• Introduction: The Fabrication of Race
• I. The Political History of Whiteness
  • 1. “Free White Persons” in the Republic, 1790–1840
  • 2. Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840–1924
  • 3. Becoming Caucasian, 1924–1965
• II. History, Race, and Perception
  • 4. 1877: The Instability of Race
  • 5. Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews
• III. The Manufacture of Caucasians
  • 6. The Crucible of Empire
  • 7. Naturalization and the Courts
  • 8. The Dawning Civil Rights Era
• Epilogue: Ethnic Revival and the Denial of White Privilege
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World

Texas A&M University Press
2010-07-12
168 pages
6 x 9, Illus.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-192-6

Edited by:

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Christopher Morris, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With the recent election of the nation’s first African American president—an individual of blended Kenyan and American heritage who spent his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia—the topic of transnational identity is reaching the forefront of the national consciousness in an unprecedented way. As our society becomes increasingly diverse and intermingled, it is increasingly imperative to understand how race and heritage impact our perceptions of and interactions with each other. Assumed Identities constitutes an important step in this direction.

However, “identity is a slippery concept,” say the editors of this instructive volume. This is nowhere more true than in the melting pot of the early trans-Atlantic cultures formed in the colonial New World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the studies in this volume show, during this period in the trans-Atlantic world individuals and groups fashioned their identities but also had identities ascribed to them by surrounding societies. The historians who have contributed to this volume investigate these processes of multiple identity formation, as well as contemporary understandings of them.

Originating in the 2007 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures presented at the University of Texas at Arlington, Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World examines, among other topics, perceptions of racial identity in the Chesapeake community, in Brazil, and in Saint-Domingue (colonial-era Haiti). As the contributors demonstrate, the cultures in which these studies are sited helped define the subjects’ self-perceptions and the ways others related to them.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race and Identity in the New World; Franklin W. Knight
• “Thy Coming Fame, Ogé! Is Sure”: New Evidence on Ogé’s 1790 Revolt and the Beginnings of the Haitian Revolution; John D. Garrigus
• “The Child Should Be Made a Christian”: Baptism, Race, and Identity in the Seventeenth-century Chesapeake; Rebecca Goetz
• West Indian Identity in the Eighteenth Century; Trevor Burnard
• Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-century Brazil; Sidney Chalhoub
• Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard
• In Memoriam, Evan Anders
• About the Contributors
• Index

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Harvard University Press
February 2012
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 1 map
Hardcover ISBN 9780674047747

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law
University of Michigan

Jean M. Hébrard, Historian and Visiting Professor
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
University of Michigan

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous: Who Counts as Indian in Post Apartheid Virginia

Mid-Atlantic Conference on the Scholarship of Diversity, Conference Proceedings
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
April 2004
17 pages

Jay Hansford C. Vest, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
University of North Carolina, Pembroke

In 1948, sociologist William Gilbert wrote: “Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa.” Gilbert chronicled remnant Indian groups of the eastern states from Maine to Texas and Virginia to Illinois. In his findings, he reported that only Vermont and New Hampshire exhibit no residual Native tribal population while Georgia, Arkansas and Illinois manifest no surviving social groups. At the time, Gilbert estimated the survival of 75,000 to 100,000 mixed-blood Natives “Who may frequently be more white or Negro in appearance” than Indian. Having fallen into disuse, the original tribal names were largely lost in time and most often the distinguishing terms applied to these Native Americans has been nicknames given them by the dominant white people.

Noting that Virginia’s surviving Indian groups tended to retain traditions of their Native origin, Gilbert identified several mixed blood groups along the Blue Ridge and Piedmont zones of the state. Stating that these concentrations “beginning with Rappahannock County in the north and continuing southward along the Blue Ridge through Rockbridge and Amherst Counties and striking directly southward to Halifax County on the North Carolina border,” he gave definition to the geographical occupation of these interior Virginia tribal groups. Specifically he identified 500 to 600 mixed bloods in central and the extreme western end of Amherst County near Bear Mountain and Tobacco Row Mountain of the Blue Ridge. Known locally as “Issues,” he describes these people as having “a very rich brunette with straight black hair and Caucasian features.” Noting a second group northwest of Amherst County, he further identified a population of over 300 “Brown people” exhibiting “a mixture of white, Indian, and occasionally Negro blood.” A third group who claimed Indian descent was identified by Gilbert in “Halifax County on the North Carolina border. Locally both groups were considered to be “mulattoes” but acknowledged as “a group apart from both whites and Negroes.” While this brief summary exhausts the information supplied by Gilbert, it does not begin to manifest the social history and cultural significance of these and other surviving Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Indian groups.

Considered in an ahistorical context, these sociological reports of “tri-racial isolates” have largely been taken as a means of undermining the aboriginal-indigenous character of surviving Native Americans in the eastern United States. Minding this conclusion, it is the intent of this paper to, first, supply to an historical background of Colonial Indian assimilation and explore the American institutional racism that has plagued these Natives, particularly in the south, and second, to consider factors of their Native-aboriginal-indigenous birthright…

Read the entire paper here.