Mixed Race Studies

Black History Month: Making truth live

The Windsor Star
2012-02-27

Elise Harding-Davis

To me, as a Canadian woman of African origins, Black History Month is meant to share factual stories and events about North America’s African-based cultures. It is also a prime time to debunk myths and validate folklore and our cherished oral histories.
 
Recent articles linking Ron Jones and me to two famous historical figures are surfacing because they bare truth. Parallel histories were crafted, theirs glorious, ours inconsequential.
 
Comparably, our family histories are just as undeniable and magnificent as those of the notable figures we are connected to. That our past was covered up and debased does not make our rightful lineage any less based in truth.
 
We are a mixture of displaced African peoples, aboriginal inhabitants and usurping European founders and pioneers of Canada and the United States, a unique hybrid creation of the North American experience. The famous, infamous and homogeneous masses are indeed our forebears.
 
We exhibit the many shades and features inherent in these cultures because they chose to mix their genetics with ours.
 
The supremacy of owning another being is intoxicating. As a result, strange mental processes led to very peculiar practices. We were not recognized as human beings. As slaves, concubines and servants, we were at the mercy and whim of those who had possession of us. Our births were generally listed with the other stock, documented in curious ways or not recorded at all, blurring the truth of our parentage.
 
Our Blackness was quantified, mulatto (half-black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black) and even sextaroon (one sixteenth black); a thirty-second part black blood, which could span eight generations, branded us as slaves. Over the course of 500 years of enslavement and servitude, legal lineage was changed from patriarchal, father to son, to matriarchal, mother to child…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review: Go White, Young Man

Vanderbilt Law Review
Volume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30)
10 pages

Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law
University of North Carolina School of Law

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Sharfstein’s book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the color line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. These case studies tell us what it is to be American—how race is central to our identity, how we use race to take down opponents or to exclude—and how the line separating black and white is sometimes porous. However, is not the story of race and American legal history about the ways that race is defined by law and by norms? Race mattered because people policed the line separating blacks and whites. That many states classified people with a small percentage of African ancestry as white suggests that it was possible to move across the color line. Still, the cases where the color line was policed, rather than crossed, are significant.

Our nation’s struggle with race is now about one-third of a millennium long. So there is a lot for Daniel Sharfstein’s epic work of American history, The Invisible Line, to engage as it sweeps across centuries—from Virginia in the 1600s to Washington, DC, in the 1950s—and as it details generations of lives, from humble farmers in Appalachia to heirs of Gilded Age merchants. Where most other people who have looked at such issues focus on the chasm between white and black, Sharfstein looks at people on the line separating black and white. He is able in this way to get at key—and often overlooked—issues, such as how people have crossed the color line in America and what efforts to cross and police it tell us about our national struggle with race and with equality.

To detail the sine curve of attitudes towards race, Sharfstein offers three case studies of how racial categorization has functioned and how it kept (or attempted to keep) African-Americans in their place. The book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. Sharfstein’s elegant prose illuminates how the color line functioned for people on both sides of it. For those who could do so, there were great incentives to claim to be white rather than black. In one era, race could define who might be a slave; in later eras, it was central to who could live in desirable locations, who could go to the most desirable schools, who could have access to the best government jobs. From statutes to social norms, African-Americans were told that they were inferior and had to maintain their place. Thus, those who might pass for white—those who had light enough skin color and perhaps the geographic mobility to mask their family history—often did so.

Some of the story of passing is well known. President Warren G. Harding is said to have remarked in response to an allegation that he had African ancestry, “How do I know? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” Some of the best-known literature of the Jim Crow era was about crossing the color line, like Nella Larson’s Passing. And even antebellum literature often addressed the crossing of the line from black to white. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, has a vignette about a light-skinned former slave who passed for white. Yet, even though we know that families crossed the color line (or attempted to), one wonders if the most important lessons from Sharfstein’s book are the ways the line was successfully policed rather than the ways it was crossed…

…We learn a great deal about the policing of the color line in Sharfstein’s book. Attempts to prevent passing sometimes failed, as in the Regulator Movement and in the Spencers’ Appalachia. In both of those cases, opponents of families who had once been identified as African-American unsuccessfully claimed that they were still African-American. But Sharfstein illustrates numerous occasions when the line was successfully policed: in Washington, DC, after Reconstruction, when O.S.B. Wall helped lead a western exodus movement; in the early twentieth century, when disfranchisement of blacks led to loss of representation in Congress and loss of civil service jobs, such as Stephen Wall’s at the Government Printing Office; and when an heir to the Field fortune—who, as a member of the Gibson family, had some African ancestry—put on a display at the Field Museum about the races of mankind.

We learn that statutes helped police the color line. For instance, statutes defined the blood quantum that permitted one to be considered white. Yet even when statutes defined one as black, social norms often classified a person as white. Sharfstein makes a bold statement about the porous nature of the color line in regard to slavery: “The difference between black and white was less about ‘blood’ or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white.” This argument shifts the basis for being considered black from blood quantum to status—though the two were often highly correlated…

Read the entire review here.

Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Littefield Lecture: The Free State of Jones: Community, Race, and Kinship in Civil War Mississippi

Littlefield Lecture
University of Texas, Austin
Applied Computational Engineering & Sciences Building (ACE), Avaya Auditorium 2.302
2012-03-06, 16:00-18:00 CST (Local Time)

Victoria Bynum, Professor Emerita
Texas State University, San Marcos

Dr. Bynum will be delivering this year’s Littlefield Lectures for the History Department of the University of Texas, Austin.  The lectures are based on research from my last two books, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War and The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies.

Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World

Oxford University Press
July 2012
300 pages
12 halftones, tables, and graphs
234x156mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-19-726524-6

Edited by

Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor of History
King’s College London

Adrian Pearce, Lecturer in Brazilian & Spanish American History
King’s College London

• Comprehensive overview of racism and ethnic relations throughout Portuguese-speaking world
• Radical updating – last overview was published in 1963
• Draws out new connections between different parts of this area over time
• Experiments with new methods, e.g. anthropological history, visual culture

How did racism evolve in different parts of the Portuguese-speaking world? How should the impact on ethnic perceptions of colonial societies based on slavery or the slave trade be evaluated? What was the reality of inter-ethnic mixture in different continents? How has the prejudice of white supremacy been confronted in Brazil and Portugal? And how should we assess the impact of recent trends of emigration and immigration? These are some of the major questions that have structured this book. It both contextualises and challenges the visions of Gilberto Freyre and Charles Boxer, which crystallised from the 1930s to the 1960s, but which still frame the public history of this topic. It studies crucial issues, including recent affirmative action in Brazil or Afro-Brazilian literature, blackness in Brazil compared with Colombia under the dynamics of identity, recent racist trends in Portugal in comparative perspective, the status of native people in colonial Portuguese Africa, discrimination against forced Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in different historical contexts, the status of mixed-race people in Brazil and Angola compared over the longue durée, the interference of Europeans in East Timor’s native marriage system, the historical policy of language in Brazil, or visual stereotypes and the proto-ethnographic gaze in early perceptions of East African peoples. The book covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, integrating contributions from history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies. It offers a radical updating of both empirical data and methodologies, and aims to contribute to current debates on racism and ethnic relations in global perspective.

Table of Contents

• Francisco Bethencourt: Introduction
• Part I. Present Issues
  • 1: António Sérgio Guimarães: Colour and Race in Brazil: From Whitening to the Search for Afro-Descent
  • 2: Peter Wade: Brazil and Colombia: Comparative Race Relations in South America
  • 3: Jorge Vala and Cícero Pereira: Racism: An Evolving Virus
  • 4: Luiz Felipe de Alencastro: Mulattos in Brazil and Angola: A Comparative Approach, Seventeenth to Twenty-First Centuries
• Part II. The Modern Framework
  • 5: João de Pina-Cabral: Charles Boxer and the Race Equivoque
  • 6: Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke: Gilberto Freyre and Brazilian Self-Perception
  • 7: David Brookshaw: Writing from the Margins: Towards an Epistemology of Contemporary African Brazilian Fiction
  • 8: Michel Cahen: Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926-62)
  • 9: Miguel Jerónimo: The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Race and Labour in the Third Portuguese Empire, ca. 1870-1930
• Part III. The Long View
  • 10: Ricardo Roque: Marriage Traps: Colonial Interactions with Indigenous Marriage Ties in East Timor
  • 11: Herbert Klein: The Free Afro-Brazilians in a Slave Society
  • 12: Andrea Daher: The ‘General Language’ and the Social Status of the Indian in Brazil, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
  • 13: José Pedro Paiva: The New Christian Divide in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)
  • 14: Jean Michel Massing: From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860

McFarland
2012 [Originally Published by University of South Carolina press in 1985]
300 pages
6 x 9
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-7864-6931-4

Larry Koger, Historian

Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but this authoritative study reveals the extent to which African Americans played a significant role as slave masters. Examining South Carolina’s diverse population of African-American slaveowners, the book demonstrates that free African Americans widely embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they—like their white counterparts—exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses.

Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, the author reveals the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. He describes how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom but how many others—primarily mulattoes born of free parents—were unfamiliar with slavery’s dehumanization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Free Black Slaveholding and the Federal Census
• 2. The Numbers and Distribution of Black Slaveholding
• 3. From Slavery to Freedom to Slaveownership
• 4. “Buying My Chidrum from Ole Massa”
• 5. Neither a Slave Nor a Free Person
• 6. The Woodson Thesis: Fact or Fiction?
• 7. White Rice, White Cotton, Brown Planters, Black Slaves
• 8. Free Black Artisans: A Need for Labor
• 9. The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy: Brown Masters vs. Black Slaves
• 10. No More Black Massa
• Appendix A. Tables for Chapter One
• Appendix B. Table for Chapter Two
• Appendix C. Tables for Chapter Six
• Notes
• Index

Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History

Arcadia Publishing
2002-10-21
160 pages
ISBN: 9780738523958

Arwin D. Smallwood, Associate Professor of History
The University of Memphis

The lives of the Native American, African, and European inhabitants of Bertie County over its 400 years of recorded history have not only shaped, but been shaped by its landscape. One of the oldest counties in North Carolina, Bertie County lies in the western coastal plains of northeastern North Carolina, bordered to the east by Albemarle Sound and the tidewater region and to the west by the Roanoke River in the piedmont. The county’s waterways and forests sustained the old Native American villages that were replaced in the eighteenth century by English plantations, cleared for the whites by African slaves. Bertie County’s inhabitants successfully developed and sustained a wide variety of crops including the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—as well as the giants: tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. The county was a leading exporter of naval stores and mineral wealth and later, a breadbasket of the Confederacy. Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History documents the long history of the region and tells how its people, at first limited by the landscape, radically altered it to support their needs. This is the story of the Native Americans, gone from the county for 200 years but for arrowheads and other artifacts. It is the story of the African slaves and their descendants and the chronicle of their struggles through slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is also the story of the Europeans and their rush to tame the wilderness in a new land. Their entwined history is clarified in dozens of new maps created especially for this book, along with vivid illustrations of forgotten faces and moments from the past.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: An Ecological History
• 1. Early History: Roanoke Island and the Chowan and Roanoke River Valleys, 1584-1711
• 2. Cultures in Conflict: The Tuscarora War and Forced Migration, 1711-1722
• 3. Life during the Colonial era, 1722-1774
• 4. The American Revolution and the Early Years of the New Republic, 1774-1803
• 5. Religion, Cotton. Tobacco, and Peanuts; The Antebellum Years, 1803-1861
• 6. A County Divided: From the Civil War to the Collapse of Reconstruction, 1861-1877
• 7. The Collapse of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow Era, 1877-1954
• 8. Life in the Rural “New South”: During and Since the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-2002
• Bibliography
• Index

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Johns Hopkins University Press
2009
352 pages
7 halftones
Hardback ISBN: 9780801886805

Jennifer M. Spear, Associate Professor of History
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Lousiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association

A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer Spear’s examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories.

Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.

Table of Contents

• Ackowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Indian Women, French Women, and the Regulation of Sex
• 2. Legislating Slavery in French New Orleans
• 3. Affranchis and Sang-Mêlé
• 4. Slavery and Freedom in Spanish New Orleans
• 5. Limpieza de Sangre and Family Formation
• 6. Negotiating Racial Identities in the 1790s
• 7. Codification of a Tripartite Racial System in Anglo-Louisiana
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary
• Essay on Sources
• Index

Unfixing Race: Class, Power, and Identity in an Interracial Family

The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 102, Number 3 (July, 1994)
pages 349-380

Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., Professor of American Religious History
Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley
Santa Clara University

This article is also available as a chapter in Martha Hode’s (ed.) Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

In November 1816 Robert Wright, a slaveholding farmer from Campbell County in the Virginia Piedmont, petitioned the General Assembly for a divorce. Because the state courts lacked jurisdiction over divorce in the early nineteenth century, the legislators regularly considered such requests. Wright’s petition, however, was unlike any other the assembly had ever received. According to Wright’s account, his marriage to Mary Godsey in 1806 had been a happy one. Describing his behavior toward her as ‘kind and affectionate,” Wright acknowledged that Mary had brought him “great domestic comfort, and felicity” until 1814, when William Arthur “by his artful, and insidious attentions” replaced Wright “in her affections.” The couple eloped in January 1815, taking with them some of Wright’s property including a female slave, but were caught in neighboring Bedford County. Wright reclaimed his possessions, and Mary consented “to return to the Home, and the Husband she had so ungratefully, and cruelly abandoned.” Despite her infidelity, Wright maintained that he had again treated his wife with affection, hoping “time… would reconcile her to her situation and restore her to Happiness.” His hopes proved illusory. Ten months later, Mary and William ran off to Tennessee. Charging her with desertion and adultery, Wright asked the assembly to pass a law ending their marriage.

Thus far the case was familiar. Tales of infidelity, desertion, and scorned love the legislators had heard before. What made Wright’s petition unique was his frank admission that as “a free man of color” he had married a white woman and so violated Virginia’s law forbidding interracial marriage. While avoiding a rhetorical style that was either defiant or obsequious, Wright defended the validity of his union and presented his case in matter-of-fact fashion. His free status apparently empowered him with a sense of personal worth and dignity and a claim to equal treatment that he was unafraid to assert publicly.  Equally noteworthy were the affidavits submitted with the memorial.  Defying the mores historians commonly ascribe to white southerners, more than fifty white citizens of Campbell County ignored Wright’s miscegenation, endorsed his request for a divorce, and testified to his good standing in their community…

Purchase the article here.

Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think

The New York Times
2005-10-31

Brent Staples

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name—and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we’ve found—Richard Staples—was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved…

…As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.

By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters’ wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.

Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The “one drop” laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.

Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American—you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized…

Read the entire essay here.