Mixed Race Studies

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

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.

Founding Chestnut Ridge: The Origins of Central West Virginia’s Multiracial Community

The Ohio State University
Department of History
Project Advisor: Randolph Roth, Professor of History and Sociology
March 2010
140 pages

Alexandra Finley
The Ohio State University

Senior Honors Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with research distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The “Guineas” of West Virginia
I. Race and the Male Brothers
II. The Legend of Sam Norris
III. The Life of Gustavus Croston
IV. Henry Dalton’s Fate
V. The Chestnut Ridge People

Appendix A: Associated Surnames and Variant Spellings
Appendix B: Related Genealogies
Appendix C: The Legend of Sam Norris
Appendix D: The Writings of Bill Peat Norris
Appendix E: Associated Families
Appendix F: Maps
Bibliography

Introduction: “A Clan of Partly Colored People:” The “Guineas” of West Virginia

For visitors to Philippi, West Virginia, the name Chestnut Ridge Road carries no significance. There is nothing to distinguish it from Main Street or Walnut Street in the minds of strangers to that small mountain town. For the people of Barbour County, however, Chestnut Ridge carries a connotation that few guests to the area can understand. Natives of the region recognize Chestnut Ridge Road, Kennedy Road, Croston School Road, and Norris Ridge Road as distinct from the rest of Philippi, home to the “Chestnut Ridge People,” the multiracial descendants of early European pioneers, free African Americans, and Native Americans.

Before the ancestors of the Chestnut Ridge People had been defined by the white community as a distinct outside group, they were individual settlers who, like frontier residents of European descent, had migrated westward in hopes of a better life. What set these men and women apart was their racial background. Some, like Henry Dalton, moved west after completing indentures that had resulted from their illegitimate “mulatto” birth. Others, like Hugh Kennedy, were descendents of multigenerational multiracial families that could be traced back to the seventeenth century. One, Wilmore Male, was an Englishman who chose to live as man and wife with his slave, Nancy.

These multiracial families’ difference from the white community gave them a shared experience. The Males and the Daltons quickly intermarried, the free black Hill family taught Henry Dalton’s children the trade of stonemasonry, and each ancestor of the Chestnut Ridge People provided support for others in the same position as themselves. The ties they created survived into the twentieth century.

Though they maintained close relationships among themselves, the ancestors of the Chestnut Ridge People did not live in an entirely insular community. Many individuals formed friendships with their white neighbors and partook in the activities of the white community. Their race was not an impediment to accumulating real estate or personal property. Nor did race prevent many from gaining respect in the wider community, especially as several of the men were Revolutionary War veterans.

Given the background of these first multiracial settlers and the levels of success experienced by many, several questions arise. How were people of mixed race treated on the frontier? Did their experience differ from that of the free black community that remained part of the Atlantic world? How was race defined on the frontier, especially in the case of individuals whose racial background was considered ambiguous? Were all of the restrictions placed on free blacks by lawmakers in the eastern half of the state enforced as stringently in the western half?

The available literature of the Chestnut Ridge community does little to address these questions. Most of what has been written on the group concerns only genealogy and fails to place individuals in a historical context. Almost all of this genealogical work avoids the issue of African heritage and, if it is addressed at all, denies such ancestry in favor of a solely Native American and European background. Additionally, the foundation of most genealogical accounts is community legend rather than historic documentation.

With the notable exception of Avery F. Gaskins, writers from other disciplines such as sociology who have dealt with the Chestnut Ridge People have also focused on legend rather than historical fact. John Burnell, for instance, examined in the 1950s the contemporary status of the group and touched upon speculations about their history without considering the issue in detail. When the community appeared in surveys like Brewton Berry’s that considered multiple multiracial groups in the United States, it was generally given little attention in comparison to better-known multiracial groups such as the Melungeons. Gaskins is the only researcher who has addressed the historical origins of the Chestnut Ridge People in detail.

Within the next five chapters, I will continue Gaskins’s work decoding the true history of the group. I aim to provide a comprehensive history of the Chestnut Ridge community into the nineteenth century and place the experiences of the first multiracial settlers to the area in a historical context. The lives of the Chestnut Ridge People’s ancestors cannot be considered outside of the era and location in which they existed or the prevailing racial attitudes that they encountered in the world around them. Considered together, the story of these multiracial settlers highlights the unique experiences of frontier life and the ways in which everyday interaction between whites and blacks could defy the standards for race relations set by lawmakers…

Read the entire paper here.

Geographies of racially mixed people and households: A focus on American Indians

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
23 pages

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota

Meghan Zacher
Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota
March 2010

Multiracial individuals and mixed race households show different residential location patterns depending on the races of the groups involved and the ways in which people report their mixed racial heritage. In this research, we focus on multiracial and interracially married American Indians in recent decades. Although they are substantively interesting, American Indians and multiracial people are rarely represented in social science research on residential location and segregation. Using U.S. public-use microdata from four decades (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2008), we map the locations of two groups of multiracial American Indians and two groups of interracially married American Indians, in comparison to their single-race counterparts. In 1980 and 1990, we measure “multiracial” using the respondents’ answers to both the race and the ancestry census questions. Our disaggregation of different types of mixed-race American Indian households extends the work of Wong (1998, 1999) and Wright et al. (2003) to reflect current sociological knowledge about the varieties of experiences of people in different multiracial situations. By doing so, this research advances knowledge about the social context of race and identity in the contemporary United States.

Read the entire paper here.

Was first black priest black enough?

Chicago Tribune
2010-05-02

Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter

Healy, son of a plantation owner, isn’t mentioned as often as Tolton, who is being pushed for sainthood

More than a year after some African-Americans scrutinized the blackness of the nation’s first black president, America’s Catholics are now wrestling with the same questions to determine who was the nation’s first black priest.

The debate emerges as the Archdiocese of Chicago seeks sainthood for the Rev. Augustus Tolton, long hailed in Chicago as the first African-American clergyman to serve in the U.S. Catholic Church.

A rival for the title is Bishop James Augustine Healy, who was ordained in 1854, the year Tolton was born. But Healy, the son of an Irish-American landowner and a mixed-race slave, was light-skinned enough to pass as a white man. And in many cases, he did…

…As bishop of Portland, Maine, Healy served another marginalized population: Native Americans.

The eldest of 10 siblings, Healy was raised Catholic but attended a Quaker school in New York. In 1849, he graduated valedictorian of the first class at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

He attended seminary in Canada and was eventually ordained in Paris. But he distanced himself from an African-American identity. He declined to participate in African-American organizations and turned down invitations to address the National Black Catholic Congress, citing the New Testament — “Christ is all and in all” — as his reason.

James O’Toole, author of “Passing for White: Race, Religion and the Healy Family [, 1820-1920],” said that denial comes across to some as betrayal. To others, it gives a new dimension to the struggle. But he believes contemporary categories or agendas shouldn’t be imposed upon historical figures.

“In a sense, that can look like racial treason. Why are you denying who you are?” said O’Toole. “Those are very much the standards of today. But they’re not their standards. As a historian, that’s what ought to govern here. … We should be assessing them on their own terms.”

But Michelle Wright, associate professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University and author of “Becoming Black [: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora],” cautions that ceding to Healy’s self-identity could further the misconception that African-Americans did not contribute to society…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country

Duke University Press
2006
392 pages
7 illustrations, 1 table

Edited by:

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

Sharon Patricia Holland, Associate Professor of English; African & African American Studies
Duke University

Contributors: Joy Harjo, Tiya Miles, Eugene B. Redmond, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sharon Patricia Holland, Tiffany M. McKinney, David A. Y. O. Chang, Barbara Krauthamer, Melinda Micco, Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, Deborah E. Kanter, Robert Warrior, Virginia Kennedy, Tamara Buffalo, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Keith Collins, Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui, Roberta J. Hill

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.

Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.

Table of Contents

• Foreword: “Not Recognized by the Tribe” / Sharon P. Holland
• Preface: Eating out of the Same Pot? / Tiya Miles
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds / Tiya Miles and Sharon Patricia Holland
  1. A Harbor of Sense: An Interview with Joy Harjo / Eugene B. Redmond
  2. An/Other Case of New England Underwriting: Negotiating Race and Property in Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge / Jennifer D. Brody and Sharon P. Holland
  3. Race and Federal Recognition in Native New England / Tiffany M. McKinney
  4. Where Will the Nation Be at Home? Race, Nationalisms, and Emigration Movements in the Creek Nation / David A. Y. O. Chang
  5. In Their “Native Country”: Freedpeople’s Understandings of Culture and Citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations / Barbara Krauthamer
  6. “Blood and Money”: The Case of Seminole Freedmen and Seminole Indians in Oklahoma / Melinda Micco
  7. “Playing Indian”? The Selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation, 1997-1998 / Celia E. Naylor
  8. “Their Hair was Curly”: Afro-Mexicans in Indian Villages, Central Mexico, 1700-1820 / Deborah E. Kanter
  9. Lone Wolf and DuBois for a New Century: Intersections of Native American and African American Literatures / Robert Warrior
  10. Native Americans, African Americans, and the Space That Is America: Indian Presence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison / Virginia Kennedy
  11. Knowing All of My Names / Tamara Buffalo
  12. After the Death of the Last: Performance as History in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots / Wendy S. Walter
  13. Katimih o Sa Chata Kiyou (Why Am I Not Choctaw)? Race in the Lived Experiences of Two Black Choctaw Mixed-Bloods / Robert Keith Collins
  14. From Ocean to o-Shen: Reggae Rap, and Hip Hop in Hawai’i / Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui
  15. Heartbreak / Roberta J. Hill
• Afterword / Robert Warrior
• References
• Contributors
• Index

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens

University of North Carolina Press
July 2008
376 pages
5.5 x 8.5, 6 illus., 8 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3203-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5883-7

Celia E. Naylor, Associate Professor of History
Dartmouth College

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma’s entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs—language, clothing, and food—but also through bonds of kinship.

Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the “red over black” relationship was no more benign than “white over black.” She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, “blood,” kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople’s struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860

Minnesota Law Review
Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007)
pages 592-656

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

“It ain’t no lie, it’s a natural fact, / You could have been colored without being so black…”
—Sung by deck hands, Auburn, Alabama, 1915–161

“They are our enemies; we marry them.”
—African Proverb

In 1819 a Scotsman named James Flint crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made his way from New York to Pittsburgh, sailed down the Ohio, and settled for eighteen months in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just opposite Louisville, Kentucky. His letters home described everything from native trees and shrubs to the “taciturnity” of American speech, “adapted to business more than to intellectual enjoyment.” Soon after arriving in Jeffersonville, Flint recounted the time when a “negro man and a white woman came before the squire of a neighbouring township, for the purpose of being married.” The official refused, citing a prohibition on “all sexual intercourse between white and coloured people, under a penalty for each offence.” Then he thought the better of it. He “suggested, that if the woman could be qualified to swear that there was black blood in her, the law would not apply. The hint was taken,” Flint wrote, “and the lancet was immediately applied to the Negro’s arm. The loving bride drank the blood, made the necessary oath, and his honour joined their hands, to the great satisfaction of all parties.”…

Ideologies of racial purity and pollution are as old as America, and so is interracial mixing. Yet the one-drop rule did not, as many have suggested, make all mixed-race people black. From the beginning, African Americans assimilated into white communities across the South. Often, becoming white did not require the deception normally associated with racial “passing”; whites knew that certain people were different and let them cross the color line anyway. These communities were not islands of racial tolerance. They could be as committed to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy as anywhere else, and so could their newest members—it was one of the things that made them white. The history of the color line is one in which people have lived quite comfortably with contradiction.

This continual process of “racial migration” upends some of the most basic assumptions about race in the United States. When Southern colonies, and later states, restricted the civil rights and livelihoods of African Americans, such measures did not simply widen the gap between white and black. Rather, these obstacles to life and liberty pushed people across the color line into whiteness. At the same time, courts and communities made it increasingly difficult to reclassify people as black after they had been living as white. With an exponentially increasing number of people who were vulnerable to reclassification, the stability of Southern communities depended on what was in essence a massive grandfathering of white people with African ancestry. This racial amnesty was accomplished through court decisions that discouraged overzealous policing of the color line; through scientific theories and popular beliefs that African ancestry would always be visible on people’s bodies; and most importantly, through small-town Southern traditions of acceptance, secrecy, and denial.

This Article reconstructs the meaning and purpose of the one-drop rule, setting it within a larger history of racial migration. Most legal scholars casually describe the rule as the American regime of race without considering its history. Other scholars have attempted to trace the rule’s origin to the emergence of the cotton economy in the 1830s, the sectional crisis of the 1850s, or Reconstruction. Still others emphasize that most Southern state legislatures did not formally adopt one-drop racial definitions until the 1910s and 1920s.  Like an aging movie star, the rule depends on soft focus to maintain its allure. Amid the vagaries of origin, few suggest anything but that people followed the one-drop rule, as they would any other bright-line rule. But the reality of racial migration reveals that the one-drop rule did not keep whites racially pure; rather, it enabled them to believe that they were.

The Article proceeds in two parts. Part I examines the one drop rule in colonial North America and the early American republic.  Theories of innate racial difference transmitted through “blood” existed well before Jamestown, leading influential scholars to interpret almost reflexively early laws defining race and slave status to be synonymous with the one-drop rule. But the rhetoric of purity was always undermined by the realities of European, African, and Native American mixture and of a permeable color line. To the extent that legislators and judges showed confidence in the salience of race, the assumption of an impassable racial divide actually made it easier for some people of African descent to become white.

Southern courts and communities did not strictly define the color line because there was little reason to go beyond slavery’s proxy of racial boundaries, and an inflexible racial regime only threatened to interfere with the smooth functioning of a slave society. The one-drop rule’s transformation from ideological current to legal bright line and presumed social reality is in essence a story of freedom. Part II examines the thirty years preceding the Civil War. The prospect of freedom for people of African descent hastened the one-drop rule’s rise as whites attempted to preserve social hierarchies and property relations in the absence of slavery. While legal scholars identify this period as a time when tightening definitions fixed the status of mixedrace people as black, I contend that rather than establish or enforce a one-drop rule, efforts to tighten the color line pushed many mixed-race people into whiteness, sometimes with the full knowledge of their communities and often in spite of court rulings or publicity. Even as this racial migration continued, however, the rule’s growing ideological prevalence in the free North would presage its eventual codification in the South after slavery’s demise. During this period of ascendancy, the rule’s ostensible opponents played an important part in propagating it. Abolitionists seldom questioned white racial purity, instead relying on the one-drop rule as a symbol of Southern cruelty and of the threats that slavery posed to Northern whites. One might argue that today’s legal scholars depend on the rule in much the same way….

The practical consequences of this history lie in the fact that every area of the law that engages with race has a foundation in the one-drop rule. The rule acts as a metric for defining group membership, allocating race-based entitlements, awarding child custody, determining the existence of discrimination and monitoring the progress of remedial measures, and theorizing racial and other group identities. If the one-drop rule functioned differently from what its unambiguous terms suggest—if, as I argue, it expressed only a superficial commitment to racial purity, all the while fostering racial migration—then we have to rethink what race means. The magnitude of racial migration is beginning to emerge through the field of population genetics, with scientists estimating that millions of Americans who identify as white have African ancestors within recent historic memory. As people identifying as white begin to claim minority status in college admissions and employment settings, African “blood” is losing its ability to define race, determine civil rights violations, and fashion remedies. The already formidable tasks of measuring disparate racial impact or minority vote dilution risk becoming impossible when group boundaries blur.

Although the history of racial migration and the one-drop rule appears to threaten civil rights policies, ultimately it may strengthen them by forcing definitions of minority status to shift from blood to a shared history of discrimination. “African blood” is not unique to blacks. Centuries of racial migration reveal that more than anything, what fixed African Americans as a discrete group was the fact that they were discriminated against. In 1940 W. E.  B. Du Bois wrote, “I recognize [black] quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” Many people of African descent could and did avoid racial oppression by becoming white. When we regard the legal category of “African American” through the lens of a shared history of discrimination, the tidy parallel that “color-blind constitutionalism” draws between race-based discrimination and remediation falters. While discrimination against African Americans was premised on innate blood-borne inferiority and the preservation of racial purity, measures designed to benefit them are much more inherently remedial than many, including the Supreme Court, have been willing to suppose. Remedial measures acknowledge a specific history, not blood.

Today we inhabit a legal regime that is the accretion of centuries of myth and amnesia. Unexamined and unchallenged, the one-drop rule remains a fixture of the civil rights landscape. The rule’s stark language carries the appearance of unassailable authority. Its sheer inhumanity has made it an easy foil for people committed to uprooting racism, so there has been little reason to examine its history. But assuming the rule’s efficacy has only continued to spread the idea of white racial purity without undermining it. Just beyond the one-drop rule’s rhetoric is a reality of mixture and migration. It is hidden in plain sight…

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“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife” Interrogating Race and Self-Identity in Loving v. Virginia

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 8, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 67-80
DOI: 10.1080/10999940500516983

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

The article reexamines the Loving V. Virginia case by focusing on their tri-racial community of Central Point, Virginia and Mildred Loving‘s self identity as an Indian woman. Loving’s self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving’s marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of Black/white intermarriage, but rather adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy which continues in the post-Civil Rights era.

The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, has garnered far less scholarly attention than its 1954 predecessor. Brown v. the Board of Education, which overturned legalized segregation. What little appeared in the way of scholarship has focused on analysis the history the history of anti-miscegenation legislation, the events which led up to the case presentation before the nine justices, the legal precedents regarding the arguments presented before the court, and the unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Until recently with the exception of an article which appeared in Ebony magazine several months after the Supreme Court decision, writers have given little attention to the personal lives of the actual plaintiffs now enshrined in American history, as “the couple that rocked the courts.”…

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