Mixed Race Studies

A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of  The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White)

The Penguin Press
January 2011

Lauren Hodapp, Senior Publicist
The Penguin Press

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

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.

What is “race” in America?

This is a question that has never had a single answer.  The idea that human beings can be classified, ordered, and assigned superior and inferior status is much older than this country.  In America racial classifications were initially justified on religious grounds, but they evolved into something biological, transmitted through blood from one generation to the next.  At the same time, race was also about how people acted and the rights that they exercised.  During slavery and Jim Crow, each state had its own rules for what made someone white and what made someone black.  Some people who were black in North Carolina, for instance, were white in South Carolina.  Even when there seemed to be some public consensus about what race was, it has always meant something different behind closed doors. 

Once we understand that African Americans were continually crossing the color line and establishing themselves as white, we have to rethink what the categories of “black” and “white” mean.  This is a history that has touched the lives of millions of Americans.  Biology—“black blood”—cannot be what makes a person black.  After all, plenty of white people have black blood, too.  In The Invisible Line I try to strip away centuries of shifting justifications for race and suggest instead that the category of “black” has always functioned as little more than a marker of discrimination.  W. E. B. Du Bois said it best: black means the “person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”

THE INVISIBLE LINE shares the stories of three families over two centuries.  How did you select these particular families?

I chose to focus on the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they epitomize how individuals and families changed racial identities from black to white in different periods of American history and in different parts of the South.  They challenge our conventional wisdom about racial identity and the color line.  I initially researched hundreds of families after years of looking through court cases, government records, histories and other scholarly works, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and family papers from manuscript collections in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. I wound up selecting the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they were typical, but also extraordinary.  An incredible wealth of material about each family has survived the centuries—letters, trial testimony, speeches, wills, property and census records, and more.  Because of this information, I was able to go beyond just establishing the fact that people migrated across the color line and could explore why they did and what effects the migration had on their lives and on the lives of their descendants.

The fluidity with which many of your subjects approach race seems, in many ways, more sophisticated than the way we envision race today. Why?

Much of what we take for granted about race and its history are actually relatively recent developments.  For example, the “one-drop rule,” or the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black, was not the law of Southern states until the 1910s and 1920s.  Before that, states used a patchwork of fractional rules—one-fourth African “blood” made a person black, one-eighth, etc.  These rules, and the ways that courts interpreted them, reflected a reality in which people were constantly crossing the color line.  If the line were policed too strictly, then virtually no one would be safe from reclassification.  And people knew it.  Many scholars today talk about race as a “social construction,” but you can find eerily similar language from plain folks in small Southern towns one hundred years ago.

What did this mean for individuals and families in the 19^th century?

White communities often knew that people were racially mixed and let them in anyway. The typical accounts of “passing for white” involve wholesale masquerade—abandoning family and moving far away, assuming a new name and identity, and the ever present fear of being found out.  But people could become white in areas where their families had lived for generations, and many could become white even when they looked different.  There was such a thing as a “dark white man.”  But for Southern communities, acceptance of individuals did not translate into tolerance on a larger scale.  In fact, some of the very communities that allowed people of color to assimilate supported slavery, segregation, and even lynching.  There was a collective denial, a capacity for living with intense contradiction that is hard for many of us to grasp today.

What did you discover in your research that particularly surprised you?

Becoming white was not necessarily an upwardly mobile act.  In fact, it could be spectacularly downwardly mobile, especially for the “Negro aristocracy” of the late nineteenth century.  Hundreds—including O.S.B. Wall’s children—traded in lives of distinction and leadership for anonymity and often poverty.  It is easy to think that crossing the color line was a perfectly rational act for people who wanted better opportunities for themselves and their children, but the fact that people would go to great lengths to become white even when it was against their interest shows just how poisonous racism has been in the United States.

Henry Louis Gates and the African American Studies department at Harvard has become a legendary source of fresh thinking about race. When you were studying with Gates was there a sense that he and the students were creating a new vision of race?

Absolutely.  My first year as a student in the department was Gates’s first year at Harvard.  He had come with a mission to reinvent the field.  The seminar I took with him that fall was not only an intense introduction to a series of extraordinary texts, but also a class devoted to rethinking what African American Studies should be and making a case for its centrality to our understanding of the American experience.  It was a very exciting time to be at Harvard, and the discussions we had nearly twenty years ago continue to influence me and my work.

How did your own experiences with and perceptions of race influence your work?

My interest in African American history developed as a child listening to stories about my father’s civil rights activism in the early 1960s—the time as an undergraduate he met Martin Luther King, Jr., his experience attending the [1963] March on Washington.  I also grew up with stories about my grandparents’ experience as the children of Eastern European immigrants living in a racially integrated neighborhood in northwest Baltimore.  They learned English from their black neighbors—it was their first exposure to what it meant to be American.

As a college student in 1993, I volunteered on a voter education project in South Africa before the country’s first free elections.  Our office was in a building with two elevators that were still marked “Europeans Only” and “Non-Europeans and Goods.”  My colleagues were all longtime anti-apartheid activists.  The government had classified them as “African,” they said, except for one, who was “Coloured” or mixed-race.  But, she explained, she was not mixed at all—she would have been classified “African,” except for the fact that her father had been a police officer.  In the 1950s an official responsible for classifying the people in her neighborhood decided to reward her father’s service by listing him as “Coloured.”  As a result of that one simple act—one word—she had led a very different life from her colleagues.  She had grown up in a different kind of township, went to different schools, and only spoke English and Afrikaans.  It was a revelation to me that something that seemed as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of personal relationships, community ties, and individual whim.  I came back to the U.S. wondering if the same kinds of things had happened here, and for the first time, I began reading legal cases from the Jim Crow South in which judges and juries had to determine whether someone was white or black.  The cases presented fascinating portraits of communities that were committed to segregation and white supremacy even as they willed themselves to forget their own ambiguous roots.

 How did your law background impact your understanding of the stories, journals, and documents that you encountered while researching THE INVISIBLE LINE?

 Dozens of court cases have involved people crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities—they are some of the best sources of material on the subject—so having experience working with legal documents really helps in making sense of this history.  From soon after the Revolution until well into the twentieth century, just about every law that distinguished white from black provided occasions where courts were forced to determine someone’s race.  Along with marriage prohibitions and segregated schools and trains, there were different tax rates, gun ownership rules, restrictions on who could testify in court, even libel penalties for falsely accusing someone of being black.  Race in America has always involved a lot of rules, and my legal training has enabled me to recognize both the power of law and its limitations.

Which of the individuals you encountered do you feel most affinity for and why?

I really enjoyed getting to know O.S.B. Wall (1825-1891), the son of a plantation owner and his slave, who was freed and sent north to become educated and learn a trade.  He began as a shoemaker and then became a radical abolitionist, Union Army officer, and eventually a politically active lawyer in Washington, D.C.  He was able to preserve his sense of honor and idealism in terrible times both before and after the Civil War.  Even when he was a humble shoemaker, he was never intimidated by powerful people.  And he had a great sense of humor.

The families that you profile span 200 years of American history. What have we previously overlooked in this time span? 

 We have overlooked one of the great mass migrations in American history: the journey from black to white.  It is a migration that affected large numbers of families and communities.  It contradicted and reinforced slavery and segregation.  It forced people to consider what race means, and changed how they thought about race.  The migration occurred alongside other mass movements in our history—the settlement of North America, our expansion west, the rise of great cities, new waves of immigration, and the industrialization of even our most isolated areas.  In a world defined by change, race could never be a static concept.  Americans have always been in motion and have continually reinvented themselves.  The migration from black to white is a part of this dynamic tradition.

More broadly, we have overlooked the vexed relationship between liberty and equality in our nation’s history.  The prospect of freedom for African Americans has been one of the major forces in the evolution of racism in the United States.  In colonial Virginia, African Americans’ quest for freedom gave rise to black codes.  Even as large numbers of African Americans were being freed during the Revolutionary Era, ideas that blacks were biologically inferior gained widespread currency.  In the decade before the Civil War, white Southerners countered Northern arguments against slavery with race-based justifications for the institution that survived its demise.  After the Civil War, black freedom took root alongside modern forms of racism that persist to this day.  Each advance in liberty gave way to potent new forms of inequality.  Every time the struggle seemed over, it had only begun again.

What about today?

The idea that race is blood-borne and grounded in science still has incredible power over how we think about ourselves and order our worlds.  Even in our “post-racial” era, it is very easy for whites to tune out issues involving African Americans or to regard blacks as fundamentally different from—even opposed to—themselves.  Race remains a potent dividing line and political tool.  I hope to shatter the notion that this line exists and help us to realize that we are all related, that the African American experience is absolutely central to the American experience generally, and that our conventional understanding of racial difference and the persistent legacy of racism are shaped in no small part by the secret history that The Invisible Line explores.

Neither Black nor White: The Saga of an American Family

The New World Africa Press
2006-03-03
252 pages
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
ISBN-10: 0976876124; ISBN-13: 978-0976876120

Joseph E. Holloway, Professor of Pan African Studies
California State University, Northridge

Historical novel, which traces the history of the Hadnot family from Gloucester, England in 1585 to New Orleans and the birth of Lucille Catherine (Celia) Hughes Hadnot the matriarch of six families that traced their descent from her. It is the true story of a black family, who were never enslaved, but owners of slaves. A tale about a people from indentured servitude, slavery, the Colfax riots, segregation and Jim Crow to Civil Rights. It is the story of a people who did not regard themselves as “neither black nor white.” It is a story of a family—one black and the other white. Both related sharing a common ancestor by the named John Hadnot. This novel by Joseph Holloway is compelling reading that explores black culture, history, Jim Crow and issues of colorism.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

University of Illinois Press
2004
344 pages
6 x 9.25 in. 
Illustrations: 25 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02939-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07194-2

Edited by

David Barry Gaspar, Professor of History
Duke University

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and History
Northwestern University

Black women who were not slaves during the era of slavery

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine’s Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, were forced to carve out their existences. Although their freedom, represented by the acquisition of property, respectability, and opportunity, always remained precarious, the collection supports the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.

Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
Los Angeles, California
2010-11-18

Manny Otiko, Our Weekly Contributor

November is Native Heritage month

There is an old joke in the Black community about women attributing long hair to having “Indian blood” in their family. But like all jokes, there is an element of truth in this statement. There are deep ties between Native Americans, America’s first residents, and Black Americans, America’s first sizable minority group.

Los Angeles resident Phil Wilkes Fixico claims both Native American and African American roots on both sides of his family. Fixico, a performance artist and activist for Black Indian culture, says that he first started exploring his genealogy, when he got into his 50s.

Fixico said he has been on an 11-year journey to identify with his Native American roots. This has included reaching out to relatives in Oklahoma, producing a DVD about the Black-Indian experience and doing presentations about Native American culture around Los Angeles…

…Fixico said that he grew up a troubled youth, who was in an out of the juvenile system. After a stint in a correctional institution, he finally turned his life around. He received help from people of all races to do this.

Fixico attributes much of his problems to an identity crisis caused by lack of knowledge about his history. At 52, he decided to start investigating his background. He knew his mother, who raised him alone, was of Creek, White and African descent, but he later learned that his biological father was also part Seminole.

Fixico discovered that his ancestors were Seminole Maroons, slaves who opted to escape captivity and form alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida…

Read the entire article here.

The Seminole Freedmen: A History
 
University of Oklahoma Press
2007
480 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806138657

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Captures the distinct identity and history of the Seminole maroons

Popularly known as “Black Seminoles,” descendants of the Seminole freedmen of Indian Territory are a unique American cultural group. Now Kevin Mulroy examines the long history of these people to show that this label denies them their rightful distinctiveness. To correct misconceptions of the historical relationship between Africans and Seminole Indians, he traces the emergence of Seminole-black identity and community from their eighteenth-century Florida origins to the present day.

Arguing that the Seminole freedmen are neither Seminoles, Africans, nor “black Indians,” Mulroy proposes that they are maroon descendants who inhabit their own racial and cultural category, which he calls “Seminole maroon.” Mulroy plumbs the historical record to show clearly that, although allied with the Seminoles, these maroons formed independent and autonomous communities that dealt with European American society differently than either Indians or African Americans did.

Mulroy describes the freedmen’s experiences as runaways from southern plantations, slaves of American Indians, participants in the Seminole Wars, and emigrants to the West. He then recounts their history during the Civil War, Reconstruction, enrollment and allotment under the Dawes Act, and early Oklahoma statehood. He also considers freedmen relations with Seminoles in Oklahoma during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Although freedmen and Seminoles enjoy a partially shared past, this book shows that the freedmen’s history and culture are unique and entirely their own.

The Enigma Of Jefferson: Mind and Body In Conflict

The New York Times
1998-11-07

Dinitia Smith

For contemporary historians, Thomas Jefferson has always been an enigma, and the new DNA evidence that he fathered at least one child by his young slave Sally Hemings simply deep ens the mystery of the man. On the one hand, Jefferson was the author of some of the most glorious sentences in the English language, his ringing affirmation of the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence. On the other, he was a slaveholder who wrote some of the vilest sentiments of racism in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785. Blacks, Jefferson wrote, have “a very strong and disagreeable odor,” they are incapable of uttering more than “a plain narration.” Jefferson also said that racial amalgamation “produces a degradation… to which no one can innocently consent.”

Most historians now believe that his relationship with Hemings probably endured for many years, if not from 1787, when Hemings, then 13 or 14, arrived in Paris as a “nurse” to Jefferson’s daughter.

Now that the new evidence is in, how can the inconsistencies in Jefferson’s character be explained?…

…But how could Jefferson have sustained a relationship with Hemings that may have lasted for 38 years if he thought that black people smelled, that they were stupid and childlike? “In general, in order to retain someone in slavery, you have to dehumanize them,”  said Edmund Morgan, author of “American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.”  “It was a standard thing that went with slavery.” 

Jefferson was also surrounded by examples of sexual relationships between masters and slaves. He had witnessed the relationships of two men he deeply admired, his father-in-law, John Wayles, and his law professor, George Wythe, with enslaved women.

Another reason Jefferson may have been able to reconcile his relationship with Hemings with his opposition to miscegenation, Ms. Gordon-Reed points out in her book, was that Hemings was his wife’s half sister, the daughter of John Wayles and his slave consort. Jefferson had been devastated by his wife’s death, and he had promised her he would never remarry. Perhaps Hemings, who was known to be beautiful, bore some of his wife’s characteristics.

But perhaps most important, Hemings, under Jefferson’s notions of race mixing, may have been in some way “white”  in his eyes. Indeed, in the 1830 census of Monticello, Hemings was listed as white. Jefferson also believed that blacks became “white”  when they had a certain amount of white blood in them, a theory he illustrated once in a complex mathematical chart drawn up in a letter to a friend. “Let ‘h’ and ‘e’ cohabit,”  Jefferson wrote, and “the half of the blood of each will be q/2 + e/2 +a/8 + A/8…”  He concluded that the more white blood they had, the more “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind.” …

Read the entire article here.

Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion

e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)
16 pages

Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Image by Bruce Yonemoto

This paper considers the antebellum performance(s) of fugitive slave Ellen Craft. Craft, an African-American female slave from Georgia, impersonated a white male slaveholder, Mr. William Johnson, in order to escape from slavery with her husband William. I argue that through various techniques of performance—cross-racial impersonation, prosthetics, costume, hair, and gender performance, for example—Craft radically destabilized nineteenth-century social norms, particularly racial and gender mores. An antebellum subject who manipulated her body as an elastic object, Ellen Craft made costumes out of the rigid nineteenth-century identities of “blackness” and “whiteness,” particularly 19th century white masculinity. In this paper, specifically, I analyze the corporeal techniques Craft wielded in her original performance to escape in America before moving to her appearances later on the abolitionist lecture stage in England.

Read the entire article here.

Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation

Brown University
May 2009
268 pages

Marisela Jiménez Ramos

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

On January 31, 2006, the Associated Press reported that while remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city on the Yucatan peninsula, construction workers stumbled upon a sixteenth-century cemetery containing what seemed to be the oldest archeological evidence of African slavery in the Americas. The cemetery had been in use as early as the mid-sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. That same day, the New York Times published an article about the discovery that focused on the teeth that had been unearthed by archeologists. At least four of the 180 bodies that were recovered showed evidence of having come from West Africa, including the most telling fact that “some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.” In January of 2006 the evidence of early African slavery in New Spain (now Mexico) was finally making “big news” in the modern world. But, for the historians, archeologists, anthropologists, or cultural investigators who have dug through dusty colonial documents in many of Mexico’s archives or have mined the world histories and local memories of Mexico’s “third root,” the news that there had been Africans in Mexico was hardly news. Scholars have always known that Mexico, along with all of the other Spanish colonies, had a comprehensive fully actualized system of African slavery. Two days after the initial AP news release, Mexico City’s El Universal and La Reforma carried the story.  What these and subsequent news articles reveal is the prevalent and dominant discourse of mestizaje—defined as the mixture of Spanish and Indian elements—and the obscurity of Mexico’s African history.

In El Universal, the director of the project, Vera Tiesler from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, reported that “the most important thing is to create a consciousness that we [Mexicans] not only originate from Indians and Europeans, but that there is also a third root.” Tiesler also commented that the discovery was especially important for Blacks in the United States because it provides further evidence of their arrival to the New World.  Underlying the language of the “rediscovery” of Mexico’s ancient Black population is the dominant discourse of mestizaje—Mexico’s ideology of racial mixture and national identity.  A major feature of this ideology is that “the African, under no circumstance persevered as pure black, either biologically or culturally.” Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of Black Mexican studies, expressed the common attitude of Mexicans who believed that “the slaves who contributed to Mexico’s genetic make-up became so completely integrated into the process of mestizaje that it is now very difficult for the layman to distinguish the Negroid features of the present population as a whole.” Our current understanding of racial mixture in Mexico does not negate the fact that Blacks were present in that country. If the African presence and influence is not obvious, it is not any less important historically. Blacks in Mexico have “disappeared” as a separate racial/ethnic group, to the point that nothing Black or African is considered Mexican. Yet, what is lacking is a clear explanation for the “disappearance” of the contributions that Blacks have made to our current understanding of Mexican identity.

The story of those bones in Campeche can be brought to life with a better understanding of the development of Mexican national identity. In this work I focus on nineteenth-century discourses of race and their intersection with nation-building and the exclusion of Blackness from what would eventually be termed, “mestizaje.” Since my purpose is not so much to understand what Mexico’s national identity is (or was), as to understand how and why it came to exclude all things Black and African, I focus my research on the period between Independence in 1821 and the the Porfiriato (1876-1911) when nationalism and national identity became a state-sponsored project. Historians like Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo have claimed that the modern nationalist project in Mexico began with the period of the Porfiriato and culminated with the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)—an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet, even before the beginning of the Porfiriato, I argue, “Mexican” identity had already been defined to a large degree. The nineteenth century period marks the beginning of Mexico’s political and social liberation from Spanish rule, as well as the beginning of a self-conscious
process of nation-building…

My goal is to make clear the role of Blacks and Blackness in nineteenth-century Mexican discourses of nation and to document their contributions to the makeup of mestizaje. I focus on what Florencia Mallón calls “discursive transformation.” Prasenjit Duara explains, “the meanings of the nation are produced mainly through linguistic mechanisms.” In reality, Blacks “disappeared” through omission from nineteenth-century discourses of race and nation, a process I call the Black exception, a term that highlights how Blacks were exempt from Mexico’s understanding of its own racial makeup.

By looking into the role of Blackness, or negritud, in nineteenth-century discourses of nation I seek to formulate a new understanding of Mexico’s national identity, but primarily a new theoretical understanding of ethnic relations in the period after independence. I investigate the social and political processes that contributed to the eventual—but by no means inevitable—‘disappearance’ of Blacks and all things African from the national self-consciousness of modern Mexico. To be more precise, I provide answers to the following questions. In the absence of racial categories in post-independence Mexico how did the understanding of what it meant to be Black change for former Blacks and for non-Blacks? More importantly, how did these definitions fit within the evolving concept of “lo Mejicano”?

I argue that Mexico’s twentieth-century struggles for social and political development cannot be understood without examining the role that nineteenth-century racial ideologies played in the institutionalization of official and unofficial conceptions of citizenship and nation-building. I hope to show how the historical record may be mined for evidence of the conflicting ideologies determining the context of the roles that Blacks would play—or would not be allowed to play—in the new nation. In addition to a reconceptualization of the discourse of mestizaje, this research will open avenues to a rethinking of the contemporary identity of Mexicans, including a recovery of the (obscured) Black presence…

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Curriculum Vitae
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Blackness of Slavery: Race in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1821
• Chapter 2: Inventing Mexico: Race and the Discourse of Independence
• Chapter 3: Mexico Mestizo: Nation and the Discourse of Race
• Chapter 4: Freedom Across the Border: U.S. Fugitive Slave Migration and the Discourse of Mexican Racial Equality, 1821-1866
• Chapter 5: The Cultural Meaning of Blackness: The Strange But True Adventures of “La Mulata de Córdoba” and “El Negrito Poeta”
• Chapter 6: Yanga: Mexico’s First Revolutionary
• Conclusion: “Where Did The Blacks Go?”

Read the entire dissertation here.