Mixed Race Studies

Telling “Forgotten” Métis Histories through Family, Community, and Individuals [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
October 2009

Camie Augustus
University of Saskatchewan

David McNab, Ute Lischke, eds. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. viii + 386 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-88920-523-9.

“We are still here.” This opening line from The Long Journey of a Forgotten People is fitting for a collection of essays on Métis identity. Although they are, as the editors tell us, “no longer Canada’s forgotten people,” a pre-1980s historiographical tradition in Canada had, indeed, forgotten them by confining them to a secondary role in Canada’s national story. If we were to take our cue from this historiography, the Métis did not survive very long into the twentieth century, and had no history outside the political and economic contributions they made to Canada’s founding—particularly through their involvement in the fur trade and in the creation of Manitoba. The Riel-centrism which subsequently dominated in the literature, at least up to the 1980s, only confirmed the illusion that Métis history was one-dimensional and event-based. Consequently, so many of the stories, histories, and cultural practices of the Métis remained (and still remain) relatively unknown in academic literature. However, more recent changes in both focus and methodology have resulted in a new approach to Métis history. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People, edited by Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, contributes to this growing field with a volume of essays that shifts the perspective from the national and political to the local and cultural by creating history through kinship, genealogy, and biography…

Read the entire review here.

The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories

Wilfrid Laurier University Press
May 2007
370 pages
ISBN13: 978-0-88920-523-9

Editors:

Ute Lischke, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University

David T. McNab, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies
York University, Toronto

Known as “Canada’s forgotten people,” the Métis have long been here, but until 1982 they lacked the legal status of Native people. At that point, however, the Métis were recognized in the constitution as one of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. A significant addition to Métis historiography, The Long Journey of a Forgotten People includes Métis voices and personal narratives that address the thorny and complicated issue of Métis identity from historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics include eastern Canadian Métis communities; British military personnel and their mixed-blood descendants; life as a Métis woman; and the Métis peoples ongoing struggle for recognition of their rights, including discussion of recent Supreme Court rulings.

Table of Contents

Preface, The Years of Achievement Ute Lischke and David T.McNab
Introduction: We Are Still Here Ute Lischke and David T.McNab

Part I: Reflections on Métis Identities

1. Out of the Bush: A Journey to a Dream Olive Patricia Dickason
2. A Long Journey: Reflections on Spirit Memory and Métis Identities David T. McNab
3. Reflections on Métis Connections in the Life and Writings of Louise Erdrich Ute Lischke
4. The Winds of Change: Métis Rights after Powley, Taku and Haida Jean Teillet

Part II: Historical Perspectives

1. “I Shall Settle, Marry, and Trade Here”: British Military Personnel and Their Mixed-Blood Descendants Sandy Campbell
2. Early Forefathers to the Athabasca Métis: Long-Term North West Company Employees Nicole St. Onge
3. Manipulating Identity: The Sault Borderlands Métis and Colmiac Intervention Karl S. Hele
4. New Light on the Plains Métis: The Buffalo Hunters of Pembinah, 1870- 71 Heather Devine
5. The Drummond Island Voyageurs and the Search for Great Lakes Métis Identity Karen J. Travers

Part III: Métis Families and Communities

1. Searching for the Silver Fox: A fur-Trade Family History Virginia (Parker) Barter
2. The Kokum Puzzle: Finding and Fitting the Pieces Donna G. Sutherland
3. “Where the White Dove Flew Up”: The Saguingue Métis Community and the Fur Trade at Southampton on Lake Huron Patsy Lou Wilson McArthur
4. My Story: Reflections on Growing Up in Lac la Biche Jaime Koebel

Of Rogues and Geldings

The American Historical Review
AHR Forum: Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness of the United States
Volume 108, Number 5 (December 2003)

Barbara J. Fields, Professor of History
Columbia University

David Hollinger has performed a valuable service by insisting on the historical uniqueness of the Afro-American experience, rejecting the false history, spurious logic, and expedient politics that collapse the situations of Afro-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans into a single category. He correctly insists that there is no counterpart for any other descent group to the one-drop or any-known-ancestry rule that, with minor exceptions, has historically identified Afro-Americans. He criticizes the bankrupt politics that has resulted from treating a multi-century history of enslavement and racist persecution as a simple variation on the immigrant experience. (He might have added that the immigrants-all version of American history, while labeling as immigrants Africans and Afro-Caribbeans who arrived as slaves as well as Indians and Mexicans whose country was taken over by outsiders, omits from its central narrative persons of African descent who truly were immigrants.) And when he gets too close to some of the very misconceptions that his own analysis ought to preclude, his good sense draws him back; as when, after speculating that greater recognition of mixed-ancestry offspring might result in greater acceptance of unambiguous African ancestry, he quickly acknowledges that greater isolation is just as likely. But the focus on “ethnoracial mixture” with the suggestion that historians should “see the history of the United States as, among other things, a story of amalgamation” is a different matter. It brings to mind an anecdote about an Irishman who, when asked the way to Ballynahinch, responds: “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here at all.”

…Whether called assimilation or amalgamation, the goal of blending in the discordant element operates on the rationale rather than on the problem. Framing questions in those terms guarantees that the answers will remain entangled in racist ideology. For example, a pair of sociologists investigating the degree of Afro-Caribbean immigrants’ assimilation into American society unquestioningly adopt as their measure of assimilation the rate of intermarriage between Afro-Caribbeans and native white Americans, rather than the much higher rate of intermarriage between Afro-Caribbeans and native Afro-Americans. The American ancestry of most native Afro-Americans goes back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, whereas native white Americans are apt to be only first or second-generation Americans. Racism thus enters unannounced and unnoticed, to define eleventh or twelfth-generation black natives as less American than the children and grandchildren of white immigrants.

The race evasion compounded by the equation of race with identity explains why the siren song of multi-racialism attracts so many people. The point is best approached by way of a question: What is wrong with racism? One answer, whose historical pedigree includes such antecedents as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Phillip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr., holds that racism is wrong because it violates the basic rights of human being and citizen. Most decent people would assent to that view, if it were put to them in so many words. But the ever-widening campaign for recognition of a “multi-racial” category of Americans suggests a different answer. What is wrong with racism, in that view, is that it subjects persons of provably mixed ancestry to the same stigma and penalties as persons of unambiguously African ancestry. The anguish of the Jean Toomer or the Anatole Broyard rests, ultimately, on a thwarted hope to be excused, on grounds of mixed ancestry, from a fate deemed entirely appropriate for persons of unambiguous African ancestry.

Such a view, for all the aura of progressivism and righteousness that currently surrounds multi-racialism, is not a cure for racism but a particularly ugly manifestation of it. For Jean Toomer and Anatole Broyard, as for today’s apostles of multi-racialism, it is mixed ancestry, rather than human status, that makes racism wrong in their case. If there is pathos in their predicament (bathos seems closer to the mark), it arises from that fact that American racism, while making no room for fractional pariahs, vaguely supposes that, logically, it ought to. White Americans have conceded little space for those claiming immunity by reason of mixed ancestry, and generally regarding passing as a particularly insidious form of deceit. The Anatole Broyard who passes without detection is like a leper who neglects to strike his clapper dish and shout “Unclean!” before approaching an inhabited area. Still, a latent strain of sentimentality has sympathized with the predicament of the person of mixed African and European ancestry: the tragic mulatto of racist literature and pop culture. Consistency seems to require that injustice be visited on the pariahs according to their quantum of pariah blood. But the imitation-of-life, tragic-mulatto plot-line works and appears tragic only if the audience simultaneously accepts two conflicting views, both racist: on the one hand, that the penalty for African taint should be proportioned to its extent; on the other, that there can be no such thing as a fractional pariah: one either is or is not…

Read or purchase article here.

Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance

Women’s Studies 197: Senior Seminar
2010-06-07
Professor Lilith Mahmud

Samantha Tenorio

The experience of black “women-loving-women” during the Harlem Renaissance is directly influenced by what Kimberlé Crenshaw terms intersectional identity, or their positioning in the social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation that are simultaneously intertwined. Considering contemporary terms like lesbian and bisexual, it is difficult to define the sexual identity of many famous black women of the early 20th century, such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Bessie Jackson to name a few. However, their work both on and off the stage contributes to the construction of identities during the Harlem Renaissance that transgress both racial and sexual conventions. Although these social identities emerged from a long history of slavery and sexual oppression, they nonetheless produced a seemingly free space for the expression of lesbian sensibilities in the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. At a time of racial segregation in America, but also of ideologies of uplift within the black community, social spaces existed in Harlem where sexual “deviance” and race-mixing could be articulated and seen explicitly. Using song lyrics, literature, and scholarly work on social and cultural spaces of the time period between 1919 and 1939, this paper analyzes how certain forms and sites of cultural production, specifically the blues, the cabaret, and literature helped to construct these transgressive identities.

…Relating Racial Movement to a Queer Politics

Similarly, but not at all equivalent, racial passing implies a more fluid movement between the worlds of black and white. Both Irene and Clare partake in passing for their own gain, though doing so in differing degrees. Their movement between the worlds of black and white represent a fluidity that speaks to a queer reading of Passing and can be read as representing sexual mobility insomuch as segregation was established in order to protect the purity of the white race. This protection is what makes Clare‘s passing, and marriage to a white man, that much more compelling. Here her passing is in direct opposition to segregation and the fear of miscegenation, which are based on the sexual reproduction of a pure white race. Thus, I understand Clare and her passing to be a symbol for the transgression of both racial and sexual boundaries. Her racial fluidity as well as her transgression both speak to a queer reading of Larsen‘s fiction…

Though an act of agency, the movement employed by Larsen can also be read as relating to the theme of mobility and fluidity that is present within queer politics. The figure of the “tragic mulatta” employed by [Nella] Larsen in Quicksand illustrates a point of mediation, or a movement between two worlds, one who is constantly taking part in criminal intimacies. Helga is eternally caught between two worlds, yet being a victim of the “one-drop rule” she is always marked as ultimately belonging to the black race.  Here, though she is of mixed-race, her character illustrates that the bi-racial character cannot exist, she must always be defined as ultimately belonging to one race, and when this individual‘s races include black, she is always labeled as such. This marks the limitations of the tragic mulatta’s movement, but still speaks to a movement that is constantly a theme of queer politics.

Read the entire paper here.

The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America

Russell Sage Foundation
May 2010
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87154-041-6

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Economics; Director of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy
University of California, Irvine

African Americans grappled with Jim Crow segregation until it was legally overturned in the 1960s. In subsequent decades, the country witnessed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America—forever changing the face of American society and making it more racially diverse than ever before. In The Diversity Paradox, authors Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean take these two poles of American collective identity—the legacy of slavery and immigration—and ask if today’s immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or if their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors. They also tackle the vexing question of whether America’s new racial diversity is helping to erode the tenacious black/white color line.

The Diversity Paradox uses population-based analyses and in-depth interviews to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Lee and Bean analyze where the color line—and the economic and social advantage it demarcates—is drawn today and on what side these new arrivals fall. They show that Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories. Racial status often shifts according to situation. Individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by outsiders or institutions. These groups also intermarry at higher rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming “American” and a form of upward social mobility. African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians and Latinos. Further, multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived as being black only—underscoring the stigma attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the “one-drop” rule. Asians and Latinos are successfully disengaging their national origins from the concept of race—like European immigrants before them—and these patterns are most evident in racially diverse parts of the country.

For the first time in 2000, the U.S. Census enabled multiracial Americans to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. Eight years later, multiracial Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. For many, these events give credibility to the claim that the death knell has been sounded for institutionalized racial exclusion. The Diversity Paradox is an extensive and eloquent examination of how contemporary immigration and the country’s new diversity are redefining the boundaries of race. The book also lays bare the powerful reality that as the old black/white color line fades a new one may well be emerging—with many African Americans still on the other side.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
2005
264 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89680-244-5

Mohamed Adhikari, Lecturer of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town, South Africa

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity’s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment.

Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people’s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

The Law: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes: Repugnant Indeed

Time Magazine
1967-06-23

Judge Leon Bazile looked down at Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving as they stood before him in 1959 in the Caroline County, Va. courtroom. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” With that, Judge Bazile sentenced the newlywed Lovings to one year in jail. Their crime: Mildred is part Negro, part Indian, and Richard is white.

In Virginia, as in 15 other states (the number was once as high as 30), there is a law barring white and colored persons from intermarrying. The Lovings could have avoided the sentence simply by leaving the state, but they eventually decided to fight the Virginia antimiscegenation law “on the ground that it was repugnant to the 14th Amendment.” In rare unanimity, all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed last week that it was repugnant indeed.

Read the entire article here.

“A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man”: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036
Print ISSN: 1042-7961
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0140

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Associate Professor of African History
University of California, Davis

This article reviews representations and lived experiences of interracial sex and métissage in twentieth-century colonial Gabon to argue that African communities and colonial societies debated over “the métis problem” as question of how to demarcate African women’s sexuality, and socioeconomic and political power in the urban locale. These discourses and social realities reflected ambiguous and contradictory colonial discourses and polyvalent struggles among Gabonese populations to recast gender and respectability in the colonial capital city. Mpongwé women’s participation in interracial relationships, frequently brokered by male kin, had unintended consequences that threatened colonial order and reordered gender hierarchies within Mpongwé communities. Following World War I through the 1950s, shifting coalitions of elite African men, colonial officials, and private French citizens—anxious of the social mobility black and mixed race women achieved and sought to maintain—frowned upon and sought to restrict interracial liasons. Mpongwé women, both black and métis, involved in interracial relationships struggled to maintain control over their property, their labor, and insist upon their respectability in the precarious urban milieu. Using oral and written sources, this article addresses a gap in the scholarship on gender, sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a dialectic in which the actions of African women shaped colonial perceptions and policies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race in an Era of Change: A Reader

Oxford University Press
September 2010
544 pages
ISBN13: 9780199752102
ISBN10: 0199752109

Edited By:

Heather Dalmage, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mansfield Institute
Roosevelt University

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology
Baruch College of the City Univerity of New York

Featuring a wide range of classic and contemporary selections, Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is an affordable and timely collection of articles on race and ethnicity in the United States today. Opening with coverage of racial formation theory, it goes on to cover “racial thinking” (including the challenging and compelling concept of “whiteness”) and the idea of “assigned and claimed” racial identities. The book also discusses the relationships between race and a variety of institutions—including healthcare, economy and work, housing and environment, education, policing and prison, the media, and the family—and concludes with a section on issues of globalization, immigration, and citizenship.

Editors Heather Dalmage and Barbara Katz Rothman have carefully edited the selections so that they will be easily accessible to students. A detailed introduction to each article contains questions designed to help students focus as they begin reading. In addition, each article is followed by a “journaling question” that encourages students to share their responses to the piece. Offering instructors great flexibility for course use—the selections can be used in any combination and in any order—Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is ideal for any undergraduate course on race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

PART I: RACIAL FORMATION THEORY

1. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from Racial Formation in the United States
2. Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Racial Formation of American Indians”
3. Nicholas DeGenova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “Latino Racial Formations in the United States: An Introduction”

PART II: RACIAL THINKING

Essentialism

4. Joanne Nagel, “Sex and Conquest: Domination and Desire on Ethnosexual Frontiers”
5. Janell Hobson, “The “Batty” Politics: Towards an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body”
6. Barbara Katz-Rothman, from The Book of Life: A Personal Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Genome Project
A Voice from the Past: Franz Boas, “Race and Progress”

The Social Construction of Race

7. Eduardo Bonilla Silva, David Embrick, Amanda Lewis, “‘I did not get that job because of a Black man…’ The storylines and testimonies of color-blind racism”
8. Margaret Hunter, “The Beauty Queue: Advantages of Light Skin”
9. Heather Dalmage, “Discovering Racial Borders”
A Voice from the Past: W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races”

Outing Whiteness

A Special Introduction by the Editors
10. France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, “Introduction: The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the ‘Third Wave'”
11. Troy Duster, “The Morphing Properties of Whiteness”
12. Jennifer L. Eichstedt, “Problematic Identities and a Search for Racial Justice”
A Voice from the Past: Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line”

PART III: RACIAL IDENTITIES

A Special Introduction by the Editors
13. Joy L. Lei, “(Un) Necessary Toughness?: ‘Those Loud Black Girls’ and Those ‘Quiet Asian Boys'”
14. Nada Elia, “Islamophobia and the ‘Privileging’ of Arab American Women”
15. Nina Asher, “Checking the Box: The Label of ‘Model Minority'”
16. Patty Talahongva, “Identity Crisis: Indian Identity in a Changing World”
17. Juan Flores, “Nueva York – Diaspora City: U.S. Latinos Between and Beyond”
18. Nancy Foner, “The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras”

PART IV: RACIALIZED AND RACIALIZING INSTITUTIONS

Economy and Work

19. Sherry Cable and Tamara L. Mix, “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations: The Rise and Fall of the American Apartheid System”
20. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination”

Housing & Environment

21. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination”
22. Mary Patillo, “Black Middle Class-Class Neighborhoods”
23. Kari Marie Norgaard, “Denied Access to Traditional Foods Including the Material Dimension to Institutional and Environmental Racism”

Education

24. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Race, Inequality, and Educational Accountability: The Irony of ‘No Child Left Behind'”
25. Amanda E. Lewis, Mark Chesler, and Tyrone Forman, “The Impact of ‘Colorblind’ Ideologies on Students of Color: Intergroup Relations at a Predominantly White University”

Policing and Prison

26. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh”
27. David Harris, “U.S. Experiences with Racial and Ethnic Profiling: History, Current Issues, and the Future”

Media

28. Jose Antonio Padin, “The Normative Mulattoes: The Press Latinos. And the Racial Climate on the Moving Immigration Frontier”
29. Jonathan Markovitz, “Anatomy of a Spectacle: Race, Gender, and Memory in the Kobe Bryant Rape Case”

Family

30. Dorothy Roberts, from Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
31. Krista M Perreira, Mimi V Chapman, and Gabriela L Stein, “Becoming an American Parent: Overcoming Challenges and Finding Strength in a New Immigrant Latino Community”

Healthcare

32. Mathew R. Anderson, Susan Moscou, Celestine Fulchon and Daniel R. Neuspiel, “The Role of Race in the Clinical Presentation”
33. Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, “Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity”

PART V: GLOBALIZATION, IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

34. Anupam Chander, “Flying the Mexican Flag in Los Angeles”
35. Patricia Hill Collins, “New Commoditites, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”
36. William I. Robinson, “‘Aqui estamos y no nos vamos!’: Global capital and immigrant rights”

Real Americans [Book Review]

The Virginia Quarterly Review
Spring 2009
pages 206-210

Oscar Villalon

What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, by Ariela J. Gross. Harvard University Press, October 2008.

As a child, there were the Americans, and then there was us.

Americans weren’t that plentiful in my grandmother’s neighborhood. The next-door neighbor to the right, he was an American. He was an older man, and he had a big grey dog chained up in his backyard. On New Year’s Eve, two of his sons got into an argument, so one of them went into a room and came back with a pistol and shot his brother dead, right there in the hallway. My grandmother’s other neighbors, two doors down, used to shoot off guns all the time too. They weren’t Americans. My uncle was roller-skating up and down the street once, when a car pulled up in front of the neighbor’s home. Just as my uncle skated by the car, the rear window lowered, and a shotgun slid out. He screamed. The window sucked back the shotgun and the car tore off. The guys in the car weren’t American, either…

Much wrangling—legal and intellectual—has gone into delineating which Americans are really Americans and which are not fully Americans: black, Indian, Latino, or Asian. How that was reckoned in our country’s history is at the heart of Ariela J. Gross’s book, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. A professor of law and history at the University of Southern California, Gross examines various court transcripts and federal rulings, stretching back to the years just before the Civil War and going well into the twentieth century, to make sense of how Americans—white Americans—decided whether a person (or an entire group of people) was just like them and so should be afforded all the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Gross supplies a specific accounting of the contortions into which communities and the courts tangled themselves while trying to figure out who was really white or black, or something else. And she looks at the consequences of this thinking, how it divided a nation into black, “non-white” (Native Americans and immigrant groups that didn’t come from Europe), and white—the people my grandmother and so many others refer to as, simply, Americans.

The necessity for classification, Gross writes, stems from “the peculiar institution.” In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, slavery had to be justified by the ideal that one group of people was intrinsically suited to be chattel and another group of people was meant to wield the whip. Slavery depended on a lot of people buying into “a powerful ideology,” the notion of race. “Fundamental to race is a hierarchy of power . . . a human Chain of Being, with white at the top and black at the bottom.” For the institution to survive, a slave’s “blackness”—those qualities identifying him as being descended from the tribe of Ham—had to be indisputable. The trouble was, if a slave didn’t have, say, dark brown skin and kinky hair, it sometimes wasn’t clear how to categorize him. This uncertainty would prove to be a persistent problem, which, Gross shows, isn’t surprising. The need to separate people was working against an unacknowledged truth about the roots of the country. Namely, there was never a time when people of different skin colors and cultures didn’t mix with each other, whether by their own volition or against their will.

Colonial America, Gross writes, was a rather mixed society. Not only were there communities of African Americans, some of whom were never slaves, but there were robust Indian nations, too, throughout the Eastern seaboard. And into these nations African Americans were often welcomed, as were some European Americans. Some were free blacks, some were former slaves; they took Indian spouses, had children, and conformed to their adopted culture. Some Indian groups, such as the Five Civilized Nations, held black slaves. They even fought on the side of the Confederacy. There was, of course, some integration between slave and master in these groups, just as there was in the white antebellum South. In early America, with each wave of births, and with the country’s ever-expanding territorial domain (meaning new towns were constantly forming where people showed up with little or no documentation of their past), the only way to know for sure if somebody was black or white was to find out whether or not he or she had a master.

This was especially the case in the South, but even there, presumably irrefutable proof wasn’t enough. Take the case of Alexina Morrison, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Louisiana woman who claimed she was not a born slave but rather a kidnapped white woman. Gross offers her case as an exemplar of how the first racial-identity trials worked: they were decided at the local level, settled by juries of white men who were ultimately more interested in how the plaintiff acted rather than how she appeared. Though Morrison “was undoubtedly a slave, and almost certainly had some African ancestry,” and despite the testimony of doctors that she was biologically black, and despite an examination of her body in court, where parts of her were poked and prodded for the “hidden marks of race,” Morrison was granted her freedom because, to use a sociological term, she “performed” white. Performing as a white woman, Gross writes, meant displaying unimpeachable moral virtue and chasteness. That, and already being accepted as white by the local community, took precedence, not only in Morrison’s case, but in so many others. Gross cites how “[d]espite the visual power of exhibition, not all candidates for whiteness were paraded before the jury, and even when they were, jurors were given many reasons not to believe their own eyes. Only 20 of 68 case records from the 19th Century South referred explicitly to inspections.” What’s more, “[o]nly 2 of 20 relied solely on physical appearance, and only one case relied on physical appearance plus a single type of evidence,” such as the plaintiff not having the “hollow arches” of a biologically white woman. In another case, Hudgins v. Wright, the plaintiff, Hannah, won her freedom by convincing the court she was Indian and not black. She claimed that her mother, a slave, was Indian. Her “red complexion” and straight hair, as well as what was described as a noble character, were proof she couldn’t possibly be black. The court’s ruling confirmed, Gross writes, that “Indians were by default citizens of a free nation; Africans were by default members of an enslaved race.”…

Read the entire review here.